The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School The College of the Liberal Arts

BODY POLITIC: GOVERNMENT AND PHYSIQUE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA

A Dissertation in

History and Women’s Studies

by

Rachel Louise Moran

©2013 Rachel Louise Moran

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2013

ii

The dissertation of Rachel Louise Moran was review and approved* by the following:

Lori Ginzberg Professor of History and Women’s Studies Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee

Greg Eghigian Associate Professor of History

Chloe Silverman Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies

Lee Ann Banaszak Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies

Jennifer Mittelstadt Associate Professor of History Special Member Rutgers University

Michael Kulikowski Professor of History and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Head, Department of History

* Signatures are on file with the Graduate School. iii

Abstract

Although often believed to be a recent phenomenon, there is a long history of federal projects designed to shape American weight and physique. These issues have not been taken seriously because they are not obvious state interventions, but are instead part of what I define as the “Advisory State.” I conceptualize the advisory state as a repertoire of governing tools, as well as the actual use of these tools. Advisory state tools are political projects instituted not through physical force and not through coercion. Rather, these governing tools include federal research with explicit social aims, an expectation that persons and groups outside the state will voluntarily do the work asked of them by state, and the use of persuasive discourses like quantification and advertising to compel what cannot be legislated. My dissertation draws from literatures of weight and physique culture, biopolitics, and feminist body history, while refusing to separate the history of weight from the politics of American state development. Refusing this separation, and recognizing the intimate bond between the federal and the cultural, requires us to refocus our ideas about how federal policy-making works. iv

Table of Contents

List of Figures…………………………………………………………...………………… v

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………… vii

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………… 1

1. Potential Energy: ………………………………………………………………… 16 Agricultural Experiment Stations and the Origins of the American Body Project

2. A Woman’s Work to Know about Children……………………………..…….. 50 Voluntary Labor for the Children’s Bureau, 1912-1928

3. Fatter, Thinner, or As Is?...... 89 The Apprehensive Advice of the Bureau of Home Economics, 1923-1933

4. Builder of Men………………………………………………………………… 116 The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Muscular State, 1933-1945

5. Big Men, Big Government?…………………………………………………… 151 The Selective Service and Physical Standards, 1940-1948

6. Advertising as Advising…..……. …..……………………………………..……. 177 The President’s Council on Youth Fitness in the Post-War Era

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………… 212

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...……… 220

v

List of Figures

Chapter 1 Figure 1 – Atwater’s respiration calorimeter … 31 Figure 2 – Diagram of Pettenkofer’s respiration apparatus … 32 Figure 3 – Edward Atkinson’ Science of Nutrition … 35 Figure 4 – Illustration from Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition” … 36 Figure 5 – Atwater, the fuel value of foods … 39 Figure 6 – Ellen Swallow Richards … 41

Chapter 2 Figure 1 – Julia Lathrop … 54 Figure 2 – Infant Mortality Thermometer … 56 Figure 3 – Bird Baldwin height-weight tables … 59 Figure 4 –Baby contest measurement card …63 Figure 5 – Children’s bureau publications … 68 Figure 6 – The Children’s Year … 77 Figure 7 – Children’s Year weight form … 80 Figure 8 – Measuring board … 81 Figure 9 – Tables developed from Children’s Year … 85

Chapter 3 Figure 1 – Hazel Stiebeling … 92 Figure 2 – Course illustration … 93 Figure 3 – Louise Stanley … 96 Figure 4 – Calcium poster … 100 Figure 5 – Nutrition worker weighing rat … 100 Figure 6 – A network of home economists … 104

Chapter 4 Figure 1 – FDR at Virginia camp … 123 Figure 2 – Robert Fechner … 127 Figure 3 – Enrollee with hammer … 140 Figure 4 – Enrollee with pipe … 141 Figure 5 – Cartoon from Happy Days … 146

Chapter 5 Figure 1 – Captain America … 151 Figure 2 – Leonard Rowntree … 155 Figure 3 – Lewis B. Hershey … 155 vi

Figure 4 – Standards relating to height, weight, and chest … 159 Figure 5 – Local examination … 160 Figure 6 – Induction examination … 162 Figure 7 – Weighing and measuring … 170

Chapter 6 Figure 1 – Shane MacCarthy and John F. Kennedy … 189 Figure 2 – Map of state support for programs … 192 Figure 3 – “Any Kid Who Wants My Job” … 198 Figure 4 – “If You See Any of Your Students” … 203 Figure 5 – “the Future Belongs to the Fit” … 207

Conclusion Figure 1 – Marine, before and after … 213 Figure 2 – WIC voucher … 215

vii

Acknowledgements Body Politics bears the imprint of innumerable colleagues, friends, and family members. It is clearer, bolder, and smarter thanks to them. Above all, I have had the incredible fortune of having two advisers on this project. Jennifer Mittelstadt and Lori Ginzberg complimented each other perfectly. Jen has been an incredible force in my intellectual development. The “big ideas” of this dissertation were shaped through discussions with her, and she consistently encouraged me to think bold and believe in my work. Lori provided shrewd critique at every stage. She did her best to kill the adverbs, passive voice, and superfluous adjectives contained within, and bears no responsibility for those that remain. I cannot imagine a better duo guiding me, and I cannot thank either of them enough. I have had a great deal of financial support in researching and writing this dissertation. At the research stage, I received generous funding from the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in Science, Technology, and Society. I also received research funding from the Eisenhower Library, the Cornell School of Human Ecology, the Penn State University College of Liberal Arts, and the George and Ann Richards Center. For writing, I am especially indebted to the time provided by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte Newcome Dissertation Fellowship and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. I also owe thanks to the History and Women’s Studies departments, Rock Ethics Center, Institute for Arts and Humanities, and College of Liberal Arts at Penn State University. All provided support for writing and revising. The University of Georgia’s Emerging Scholars Fellowship in Home Economics also provided an opportunity to refine the ideas in Chapter 3. I had the fortune of working with a number of enthusiastic, helpful archivists. Gene Morris has assisted me year after year at the National Archives II. At Cornell, Eileen Keating knew every record group in and out. Emma Brock at the Advertising Council archives and Janice Goldblum at the National Academies of Science archives both went above and beyond. I am indebted to too many other wonderful archivists to list here, but suffice it to say the extensive archival research of this project would not have been possible without their assistance. My colleagues at UVA’s Miller Center allowed me to spend a year in an academic fantasyland, from daily debates on politics to springtime wiffleball games. Thank you Emily Charnock, Jack Epstein, Robert Henderson, and Kyle Lascurettes. My time there also led me to two wonderful mentors, Brian Balogh and Margot Canaday. I cannot imagine the dissertation without their insightful reads of early chapter drafts. Greg Eghigian has challenged me to keep contemporary political and social concerns at the forefront of my historical inquiry. Chloe Silverman, Lee Ann Banaszak, and David Atwill have all provided critical intellectual and professional support. A special thanks to Beate Brunow, Matt Isham, Katie Johnson, Cecilia Márquez, Amy Rutenberg, and Emily Seitz. Each has generously read and critiqued pieces of this, and has influenced the ideas presented here. Finally, I owe impossible debts to my partner and my parents. Jack Phillips enthusiastically read drafts while stationed in the Gulf and made me very strong coffee while home. He has also helped keep me focused on the big picture: that I don’t just want to produce knowledge, I want to produce knowledge that matters beyond academia. My parents have also been incredible through the process. I was raised to ask hard questions, read everything in sight, and take intellectual risks. Never once did they question my academic path, even when any normal parent would worry about their kid pursuing seven years of extra education with poor job outcomes. They just trusted that I could pull it off, and promised to be there if I could not. This project is for them. 1

Introduction

“Anyone who thinks the president has no effect on the average person’s life should corner a teenage girl and ask her about the ‘flexed arm hang.’”1

-comedian Sarah Vowell

When First Lady Michelle Obama announced a national weight loss and fitness initiative called “Let’s Move” in 2010, not everyone was a fan. Fox News correspondent Sean Hannity said the program was “taking the nanny state to a new level.” “Michelle Obama,” he explained,

“is suggesting what you should feed your children.”2 On another television show that night, outspoken conservative Glenn Beck also sounded off on the initiative. Sure, it seemed like it was just a suggestion now, but Beck believed such a plan would soon become coercive. “You’re going to have to make it more and more difficult” to eat unhealthily, he explained. And when people continue to make apparently unhealthy choices despite federal suggestions, he reasoned,

“now you have to start thinking about punishments. Maybe a fine, maybe even jail.” The road to the french fry police, he explained, “always starts with a nudge.”3

Glenn Beck’s concern about so-called “nudges” from government was pointed. Cass

Sunstein, President Barak Obama’s “regulatory czar,” was working to make nudging central to administration policy.4 Sunstein co-authored a book, Nudge, in 2008, in which he argued that

1 Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 108. 2 Hannity, September 14, 2010, cited in Shauna Theel, “Right-wing Media Attack Michelle Obama for Fighting Childhood Obesity, Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/09/17/right-wing-media-attack-michelle- obama-for-figh/170761 3 Glenn Beck, September 14, 2010, in Theel, “Right-wing Media Attack,” Media Matters, For similar comments Beck made earlier in the week, see Jeremy Holden, “Beck Attacks Michelle Obama for Trying to Raise Awareness of and Combat Childhood Obesity,” Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2010/02/12/beck-attacks-michelle- obama-for-trying-to-raise/160422 4 Jonathan Weisman and Jess Bravin, “Obama’s Regulatory czar Likely to Set a New Tone” Wall Street Journal (January 8th, 2009), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123138051682263203.html 2 most people do a poor job making their own decisions on everything from health to finances to the environment. Sunstein advocated managing citizens’ choices through what he called

“libertarian paternalism.”5 This meant “nudging” people, or changing the way different choices were presented in ways that would encourage citizens to make more desirable choices while still letting them believe they were choosing freely. Barak Obama appointed him to head the White

House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; Glenn Beck labeled him “the most dangerous man in America.”6

Nudges became a guiding principal for Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity initiative, Let’s Move. Let’s Move nudged educators and parents toward creating and strengthening their own school and community health programs.7 It asked the food industry and restaurants to self-regulate, and for some local-level government interventions. All of these interventions were nudges. Let’s Move did not endorse bans on or taxes of any food or beverage, or endorse any fitness or weight requirements.

Michelle Obama spent as much time as the campaign’s figurehead as she did designing policy. She did push-ups on the Ellen Show, exercised with the cast of The Biggest Loser, and showed off “mom dancing” with Jimmy Fallon.8 This type of publicity was, overwhelmingly, the

5 Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale, 2008); Cass R. Sunstein, “It’s For Your Own Good!” New York Review of Books (March 7th, 2013): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good/ 6 Ariel Edwards-Levy, “Cass Sunstein Received Death Threats, He Says in New Book” Huffington Post (March 22nd, 2013): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/22/cass-sunstein-death-threats_n_2931871.html ; Tory Newmyer, “Meet Cass Sustein: Obama’s Superego” Fortune (February 22nd, 2013): http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/22/cass-sunstein-simpler/ ; Dan Froomkin, “Cass Sunstein’s Resignation Encourages Advocates of Health and Safety” Huffington Post (August 4th, 2012): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/03/cass-sunsteins-resignation_n_1738438.html 7 Let’s Move, “Learn the Facts,” Let’s Move, accessed May 2, 2013, http://www.letsmove.gov/learn- facts/epidemic-childhood-obesity 8 “Michelle Obama vs. Ellen DeGeneres on Air Push-Up Contest,” Huffington Post (February 2nd, 2012): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/michelle-obama-ellen-degeneres-push-ups_n_1250242.html ; Caitlin McDevitt, “Michelle Obama Appears on Biggest Loser,” Politico (April 3rd, 2012): http://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2012/04/michelle-obama-appears-on-biggest-loser-119553.html ; Bill Carter, “First Lady’s Dance Moves Catch Fire on the Web,” New York Times (March 3rd, 2013): 3 shape that Let’s Move and Michelle Obama’s obesity policy interventions took. To the political left, the “nudge” approach was evidence that’s Let’s Move was a failure, a waste of time.9 For some on the political right, however, the nudging, advising state was all coercion. Beck explained that the administration’s use of nudging was about treating citizens like rats, and using

“all the tricks and all the levers to make them behave the way he wants them to.”10 Nudges, though, should neither be dismissed as pointless nor portrayed as terrifying. This form of federal intervention is not new. Impulses toward such governance today must be understood in an historical context.

Let’s Move is heir to a long history of federal projects designed to shape American weight and physique through what I call the “advisory state.” I conceptualize the advisory state as a repertoire of governing tools, as well as the actual use of these tools. These are governing tools with subtle technique but real impact. Advisory state tools are political projects instituted through neither physical force nor coercion. Rather, these governing tools include federal research with explicit social aims, an expectation that persons and groups outside the state will voluntarily do the work asked of them by state, and the use of persuasive discourses like quantification and advertising to compel (even “nudge”) what cannot be legislated.

Neither federal body projects nor the use of advisory techniques of governance to implement these projects is new. When we ignore the history of these interventions, it is easy to imagine the waistline or the bicep as a strange new terrain of government. This omission misleads our current thinking about the state, and conceals a layered, complicated history of the http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/michelle-obama%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98mom- dancing%E2%80%99-on-jimmy-fallon-is-a-youtube-hit/ 9 Neil Seeman, “Move if U Wanna: Obama and the Weight Loss Nudge,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 183, no. 1 (January 2011): 152; Ali Pechman, Researchers, Activists, Find Let’s Move Nothing More than a Nudge,” Medill on the Hill of Northwestern University (March 2nd, 2010): http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/390/news.aspx?id=158846 10 Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck, Fox News, April 21st, 2010, transcript published April 22nd, 2010, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,591374,00.html 4 government and the body. The concealment of this history impairs our ability to fully comprehend current body politics. Policy making is after all a historical process, made not just in its present context but also in response to all the policies that have come before and the reactions with which they were met.11

Part of the reason we often fail to make the connection between the contemporary and historical politics of weight is that we have almost no memory of this political history of weight from which to make comparisons. It is a largely unwritten history. This dissertation provides some of that missing precedent. We cannot understand current programs and policies without understanding the history of state intervention in the weight, musculature, and size of its citizens.

From federal research on working class dietary needs to programs meant to measure and weigh children in the 1920s, and from World War II physical standards to Cold War school fitness programming, there is a rich history of how the body became political.

This is the story of why the federal government cares about weight and muscles. It is the story of which bodies it cares about, which bodies seem in need of regulation and at which moments, and of which bodies go untouched. Above all it is a story about the mechanisms through which American body projects are conducted. It is a story about what we see, what we do not see, and what we need to see. It is a story about redefining what we understand as politics.

This is the story of federal agencies, voluntary organizations, politicians, and ordinary citizens between 1870 and 1965. This is not the story of every single body project undertaken in this hundred-year period. I do not discuss projects outside the realm of weight, physique, and musculature. Body projects aimed at managing reproduction and sexuality come up only in moments of comparison. Those projects tend to use different political mechanisms and to use

11 Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge, 1985), 119. 5 them to different aims, as the historical literature already shows. This is also not the story of diet, nutrition, and food in and of themselves. As such there are many stories that readers may be surprised to find omitted, including food rationing, the pure food and drug movement, and the enrichment of flours, cereals, and dairy. Each of those stories is indeed a political one, but I do not label them as “body politics” per se. Nutrition, enrichment, rationing, and public health all certainly have an impact one the shapes and sizes American bodies take. Rationing might whittle away at a citizen’s waistline, while milk supplemented with Vitamin D might strengthen bone and increase skeletal development in youth. These projects used an internal, rather than external, model of health, and were not directly meant to change the aesthetics of the visible body. This dissertation, in contrast, considers the story of the external body, of weight and physique, as a federal-level political issue.

I am not the first to historicize the American body. A small number of American historians have begun to historicize height and weight. However, these histories primarily use a cultural lens. Hillel Schwartz and Peter Stearns have focused heavily on women’s magazines, advertising, and fads.12 Cultural sources and the resultant cultural histories have provided insight into the social pressures and psychology of the body in the pre- “obesity epidemic” age, and they re-frame “body projects” as social rather than individual concerns. Very rarely, however, do such studies consider the political underpinnings of these social projects.

Exceptions include Warren Belasco, who understands an emerging dieting culture of the

1960s as in part a project of avoiding the burdens and “weight” of a bourgeois existence and

Judith Sealander, who analyzes the Progressive Era “playground movement” and the development of school lunches for the underweight as a sign of children’s physical health

12 Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasy, and Fat (New York: Free Press, 1986); Peter Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: NYU, 1997); Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997). 6 becoming a political project.13 Even in these cases, however, the politics of body-shaping are minor pieces of the story. In other cases, issues of food or nutrition – issues just adjacent to the body - have been analyzed as political projects at their core. Histories of war time rationing and food purity likewise treat food as a political issue, but pay limited attention to the end products of food consumption.14

There is another body literature, however, rich with political analysis. This is the feminist history of the body. These stories are not about the body as I discuss it here – they are not about weight or physique and size. They are instead primarily about reproductive body projects, including forced sterilization, abortion regulations, and federal involvement in birth control.15

These narratives of American body politics have primarily focused on the invasive role that the state has played with certain bodies at certain moments. These narratives establish the importance of the gendered body (primarily the woman’s body) to the state. They provide insight into how the state forcefully manages certain bodies, which I draw on in this dissertation. These stories, though, rarely extend to the quieter, subtler interests of the federal government in the body.

13 Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (Ithaca: Cornell, 2006), 225; Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Youth in the Twentieth- Century (New York: Cambridge, 2003), 293. 14 For rationing, see Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: Illinois, 1998). For the rise of vitamins, see Rima Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1996). For the pure food and drug movement, see Lorine Swainston Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879-1914 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006) and Phillip J. Hilts, Protecting American’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2004). 15 On reproductive rights, see: Jeanne Flavin, Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America (New York: NYU, 2010); Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, (Urbana: Illinois, 2002); Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkley: University of California, 1998); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2005). On eugenics specifically, see: Paul Lombardo, A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana, 2011), Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2010); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkley: University of California, 2005). 7

The subtlety of state behaviors has become a topic of greater interest in political history over the past decade. This is especially true for scholars of American political development

(APD). APD scholars have focused on a hidden state, called alternatively “a government out of sight,” “the submerged state,” or “the hidden welfare state.”16 The literature focuses on policies and programs previously not considered active state interventions. In some cases these might be called a government that wants to “enable rather than command” its citizens.17 Historians and political scientists have revealed the hidden state to include everything from security, to transportation, to tax cuts, to trade: all federal interventions critical to American development yet often overlooked.18

Related to this literature is a literature of those outside of the state working on its behalf.

This includes two sub-literatures, that of the voluntary state and that of the public-private state.

The voluntary state refers to the many federal programs which have relied on the unpaid labor of women’s clubs, schools, and uncompensated individual citizens. These are the stories of individuals, charities, and social movements all turned into arms of the state in times of emergency. Women were coerced into volunteering for the state during World War I. Private charities switched their anti-public welfare stance and began collaborating with public social

16 Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2009); Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States, (Princeton: Princeton, 1997); Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about US Social Policy, (Princeton: Princeton, 2008); William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review (June 2008): 752-772. See also the responses to Novak, and then his defense, in the June 2010 issue of the American Historical Review. 17 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 2-3. 18 Adam Sheingate adds another factor to this: the idea that the design of American government, in which power and resources are concentrated at local and state rather than federal levels; has helped “hide” the state. The state is not hidden, he says, it is in plain sight – we simply do not read local employees like police officers and teachers as part of the “government.” Adam Sheingate, “Why Can’t Americans See the State?” The Forum 7, no. 4 (2009): 1- 14. 8 services in the Depression Era.19 The public-private state refers to the outsourcing of federal programs to the private sector, or to the collaboration between private sector and public sector programming. Some political scientists refer to this outsourced state as the “hollow state,” a state in which policy work is contracted out through an elaborate set of mechanisms.20 Historians have also analyzed the public-private state. The public-private literature breaks down the line between the two categories, emphasizing the public funds sent to private nursing homes, medical clinics, and other seemingly-private organizations. It also exposes the privatization of many social welfare benefits in the second half of the twentieth century.21 Recognizing the hidden, voluntary, and public-private aspects of the American state helps expand our understanding of the meaning and means of federal governance. Advice, standards, and outsourced government must be understood in conversation with one another, and as part of a single conversation about state development.

Historians have largely ignored American weight, size, and musculature. More broadly, they have ignored the relationship between the American state and physique. Political historians concerned with policy making and US state development have considered the topic of weight frivolous, while scholars interested in physique usually approach it from perspectives that highlight the psychological and cultural over the explicitly political. Since many federal interventions into physique are administered through policy-making techniques such as research, advice, education, and advertising, it is has been easy to dismiss them as not being policy-

19 Christopher Capozolla, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford: Oxford, 2010), Andrew J. F. Morris, The Limits of Volunteerism: Charity and Welfare from the New Deal through the Great Society (Cambridge, Cambridge, 2009). 20 H. Brinton Milward and Keith G. Provan, “Governing the Hollow State,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 10, no.2 (2000): 359, H. Brinton Milward, “Symposium on the Hollow State: Capacity, Control, and Performance in Organizational Settings,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 6, no.3 (April 1996): 193-196. 21 Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton, 2003), 8; Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002). 9 making at all. This has been a lapse in feminist body histories as well; even when these studies consider the political, they tend to focus on the most obvious of state interventions to the exclusion of the subtle and advisory. My dissertation draws from literatures of weight and physique culture, biopolitics, and feminist body history, while refusing to separate the history of weight from the politics of American state development.

Refusing this separation, and recognizing the intimate bond between the federal and the cultural, requires us to refocus our ideas about how federal policy-making works. Even as we have stretched the meaning of the state in the last ten years, there is much left out of the fold. I argue here that we need to consider the role of the “advisory” technologies of the state when it comes to managing citizens’ bodies.

Advisory state projects are complex political entities. Instituted through backdoors and external actors, voluntary agencies and glossy pamphlets, the advisory state is government out of sight, yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. Advisory state technologies of governance are diverse, but are all bound by their ability to shape policy – and as it applies to weight, shape the literal body politic – in relatively quiet ways. The main ways I find the advisory state to have functioned in the realm of body projects is through the use of authoritative statistics and standards, and through the ability of the state to compel women’s unpaid labor.

The authority of numbers – height-weight statistics, physical standards, and scale readings – offered an aura of truth to political ideas about the body throughout the century I study here. Statistics gave the appearance of being objective and apolitical, of making

“knowledge impersonal.”22 The use of standards conjured the image of a rational, organized state project. When height-weight standards were invoked to determine if a body was war-ready,

22 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton, 1995), 11, 73-78. 10 work-ready, or adequately masculine, the project appeared above the fray of opinion and bias.23

Advisory state body projects have been enabled by the rationalization and quantification of the citizen body.

Much of this advisory state work has used women’s voluntary labor as an extension of the state. The nurturing roles imposed on 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, positioned them as a friendly arm of the state. Intimate politics, such as the measurement of children’s bodies or the preparation of family meal plans, required a soft touch.

Wrapping state body projects in gendered, familial narratives made certain advisory plans possible. These mothers, wives, nurses and teachers were called on to measure bodies, implement standards, and make the American body projects feel apolitical and individual. These calls might technically have been voluntary, but they were voluntary within a system of gendered political power. In such a system, women’s so-called voluntary political behavior is often compelled.24

23 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Boston: MIT, 2000), 53; Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, editors. Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca: Cornell, 2009); Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton, 1995); Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton, 1988); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1990); Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006); Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Cambridge: Belknap, 1990), 169- 174; Frank H. Hankins, “Adolphe Quetelet as Statistician” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1908). 24 Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 2008, 87; On early 20th century women’s political culture, see: Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale, 1997); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Dominion in American Reform: 1880-1935 (Oxford: Oxford, 1994); Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Toward Defining Maternalism in US History,” Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 110-113; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford, 1990); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Reformers,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States, 1880-1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990): 1076-1108. 11

While women were common political actors in advisory state work on the body, they were not necessarily its objects. When I began this project, I meant to study primarily female bodies. Because of feminist scholarship, a study of weight, shape, and physique in the United

States quickly conjures up the image of female bodies. Feminist critique has also often focused on the female body as an object of political interest and regulation.25 The story of advisory state body projects, however, is actually 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 these laboring and military bodies were imagined 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, were so often the object of the advisory state is not likely a simple coincidence. Instead, it shows that the objects of the advisory state are often the bodies that are politically beyond more hands-on means. American masculinity, sociologist Michael Kimmel argues, was largely defined by the idea of autonomy.

Kimmel argues the idea of the “self-made man” emerged in late eighteenth century America, a product of Revolution Era politics and economics.26 “Being a man,” he explains, “meant being in charge of one’s own life, liberty, and property.”27 This obsession with political and economic autonomy, others have argued, was also about white men differentiating themselves from white women, who were increasingly defined as both selfless and dependent in the early nineteenth

25 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California, 1995); Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Susan Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue (London: Random House, 1982); Susie Orbach, Bodies (New York: Picador, 2009). 26 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 13. 27 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 18. 12 century.28 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, women’s political activism redefined dominant American femininities, but it did not make American masculinities less invested in autonomy and individualism. Instead of changing, American masculinities were understood as perpetually “in crisis” in the first half of the twentieth century.29 With the critical exception of the draft, political interventions designed to repair American manhood – to improve laborers, providers, or soldiers, say – could not be directive without undermining autonomy and independence as central tenets of white masculinity.30

These male citizens, however could be subjected to the methods of the advisory state.

From advice that changed what wives and mothers fed these men, to standards defining the proper male body, the advisory state chose at different moments from an arsenal of quiet shaping methods. Much of the time these techniques shaped the man’s mind before they shaped his body.

The process of labeling the normal and abnormal creates people in these groups; someone under the height-weight standards becomes an “underweight person,” an identity crafted out of a simple statistical category.31

The Foucauldian concept of governmentality informs my approach to my sources. Michel

Foucault argues that contemporary Western governments achieve political legitimacy in part through a reliance on “technologies of the self.32 Technologies of the self are the ways in which the state encourages individuals to govern themselves, to care for their own minds and bodies.

Citizens are to live healthfully less because it is good for them, than because it is moral, normal,

28 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 218. 29 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: Chicago, 1995). 30 Amy Rutenberg, “Drafting for Domesticity: American Deferment Policy during the Cold War, 1948-1965” Cold War History 13, no. 1 (2013): 1-20. 31 Nikolas Rose, Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998); Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” London Review of Books 28, no. 16 (August 17, 2006): 23-36. 32 Michel Foucualt, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87. 13 and responsible. Although they are actually shaping their bodies to meet political and social standards, individuals will feel as though they are doing so out of free will. Governmentality thus undergirds aspects of the advisory state concept. The effectiveness of advice-giving and standard-creation depends so much on it changing the ideas, expectations, goals, and desires of citizens. The idea of governmentality illuminates this work of government. It also helps us make sense of what we cannot easily measure, in this case how subtle, advisory state projects alter the mentality of citizens.

I organize the dissertation into six chronological chapters, roughly spanning 1880-1965.

Chapter one, “Potential Energy: Agricultural Experiment Stations and the Origins of the

American Body Project,” examines the creation of late-nineteenth century American nutrition science by Dr. Wilbur Atwater. Based in principles of energy and physical efficiency, women were to imagine the male, laboring body as a modern machine, and to fuel it accordingly.

Chapter two, “A Woman’s Work to Know about Children: Voluntary Labor for the Children’s

Bureau, 1912-1928,” turns to the 1910s and 1920s when the federal Children’s Bureau refocused the project of building efficient bodies on the youngest Americans. The Children’s Bureau encouraged mothers and teachers to embrace height-weight statistics to assess and improve children’s physique. The understanding that physique was synonymous with health gained traction by chapter three, “Fatter, Thinner, or As Is: Diet Advice from the Bureau of Home

Economics, 1923-1933.” By the 1930s women were requesting that the nutrition-focused Bureau of Home Economics advise them on weight as well as health issues. This advisory work on physique and weight gave way to somewhat more directive work amid the Great Depression and in World War II, when political circumstances made some unusually directive federal intervention into male physique acceptable. 14

Chapter four, “Builder of Men: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Muscular

State,” considers the relationship between directive and advisory body projects in the 1930s.

Amid the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps directly shaped the bodies of men enrolled in its camps through feeding, labor, health care, and monthly weigh-ins. This directive work was then broadcast nationally. National attention to improved male physique and weight served as a federal advertisement for the appropriate male body; in essence the small-scale directive project of the Corps was used as the raw material for a large-scale advisory project on the Depression-Era male body.

That advisory project becomes especially important in chapter five, “Big Men, Big

Government? The Selective Service and Physical Standards, 1940-1948.” As men were called up by the Selective Service at the outset of US entry into World War II, they were subjected to multiple physical examinations. Federal physical standards helped define the new American body: the height, weight, and musculature of the acceptable young man now made part of a high- stakes military manpower project. By chapter six, “Advertising as Advising: The President’s

Council on Youth Fitness in the Post-War Era,” total mobilization was over, and the primary federal government body project receded again to the advisory. The President’s Council on

Youth Fitness encouraged children’s fitness through a revival of purely advisory work. This time, in the mass consumer society of Post-War America, it utilized advertisements, celebrity endorsements, and public service announcements as the new direction of the advisory state project on physique and the American body. While the consumerist aspects of the Council were, much of the earlier advisory state remained consistent. The Council relied on a public-private network, on cooperation between federal agencies, mothers and teachers, and voluntary organizations. Moreover, it relied on the ideas of physical standards and weight made normal 15 through pre-war body projects. Finally, I conclude by briefly considering the directions of federal body projects and the advisory state after the 1960s.

This story of American physique is built around an excavation of the advisory state. Rich literatures on the hidden state, the public-private state, and the reliance of the state on voluntary organizations must be understood as part of one story about twentieth-century American politics.

Only through such a synthesis can we understand how policies and projects of the advisory state are not peripheral but are in fact central to modern governance. Moreover, this story of American physique brings gender to the fore. Too often, discussions of the hidden and public-private aspects of state perpetuate the absence of gender from studies of the federal government in the twentieth-century. Using Alice Kessler-Harris’ idea of the “gendered imagination,” however, it is evident that gender politics undergird the entire advisory project.33 In this story of physique, we find women are often advisory actors and men are often advisory subjects – and that these relations are central to how power operates in the advisory state.

33 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York, Oxford, 2001). 16

Chapter 1

Potential Energy: Agricultural Experiment Stations and the Origins of the American Body Project

In an 1888 treatise on nutrition science, Dr. Wilbur Olin Atwater considered the practical problems of properly feeding Americans. Today remembered as the “father of American nutrition,” Atwater expressed a fatherly concern over women’s food shopping habits. “The good wife and mother does not understand about protein and potential energy,” he wrote. Nor did she understand “the connection between the nutritive value of food and the price she pays for it.”

Atwater believed that everyone’s diet would ultimately be better managed through a scientific approach. Once nutrition science was printed in more venues, once it was made better available to doctors, public health workers, settlement house professionals, Atwater argued, it would eventually enter the American vernacular.1 Atwater’s career illustrates how increasing attention to the working class body in the late 19th century led to the allocation of federal resources to address the problem by the early 20th century. Atwater’s research was the vehicle through which concerns over American strength, vigor, and vitality began to receive direct federal research attention and funding.

Many Progressive-Era Americans shared Atwater’s vision of an ordered, scientific society. The late nineteenth-century was characterized by economic, racial, and national divisions. Jim Crow laws grew increasingly strict. European immigrants worked twelve-hour days in dirty, dangerous northern factories.2 In response to a society that seemed out of control, a number of Americans sought to re-organize the nation is ways that would reestablish their

1 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition V: The Pecuniary Economy of Food,” The Century 35, no. 3 (Jan. 1888): 438. 2 Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton, 2012), 29-30; John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2000), 26. 17 control.3 Against big banks and big railroads, against monopolies and trusts, against rampant political corruption, a middle class sought to respond to these end of century social problems through increased order and expertise.4

Atwater’s interest in scientific nutrition fit well into an era celebrating efficiency and order. It could provide more efficient ways of feeding poor Americans. More importantly, it could provide stern advice and persuasive scientific expertise with instruction for teaching poor women to themselves properly feed their families on the cheap. Educating these women about

“scientific nutrition” could mean more vigorous male workers. It could also mean that these men and their families could be kept vigorous without the increases in wages.

If American women, especially those in poorer families, could learn just the most rudimentary points of nutrition, Atwater and his supporters reasoned that the men they were feeding could be better assimilated into American society. This education would require quantification and scientific language as a way of making nutrition knowledge clear, straight- forward, and authoritative. This approach reverberated especially loudly for those driven by

Progressive-style economics. Nutrition education promised a “sound and economical basis” of human health.5 Atwater often referred to dietaries as the pecuniary economy of food.6 His federally-funded, centralized nutrition research would be the basis of a specialized mode of governance. Women – wives, mothers, and household managers – stood at the forefront of the everyday American decisions about nutrition. Through scientific nutrition, activists like Atwater and his supporters hoped these women might internalize specific ideas about foods, and specific

3 Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 6. 4 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 166; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: Norton, 2008). 5 Gerald F. Combs, “Celebration of the Past: Nutrition at USDA,” Journal of Nutrition 124, no. 9 (September 1994): 1729S. 6 Wilbur Olin Atwater, Methods and Results on the Investigations of Chemistry and Economy of Food, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1895), 10. 18 ways of shopping and cooking, which would theoretically mean improved American physique. I argue that the Progressive promise of nutrition science allowed for both federal funding and extensive work in making science accessible. This promise, though, came with the understanding that the human body was manageable and malleable. Proper discipline would make an ideal citizen inside and out. Less than ideal bodies, by extension, must be the product of improper discipline.

Atwater was not deemed the “father of American nutrition” just because he conducted innovative experiments on calories. Rather, his work promised to make Americans better, stronger, and more efficient. Calorie counts and dietary studies offered a neatly scientific, quantified method of addressing otherwise overwhelming social problems. Atwater’s case for the new nutrition science – and for his own federal funding and job – rest on this premise.

This chapter examines the rise of the science of nutrition in America at a moment of transition from agricultural and animal science to the science of human nutrition. It briefly traces the investment of federal funds into agricultural science beginning in the mid-19th century, and the growing interest in human nutrition that emerged from these laboratories by end of the nineteenth century. It then focuses on the increased investment of federal funding into human nutrition research, primarily through Agricultural Extension Stations and the Office of Extension

Stations (where Wilbur Atwater was the first director). Money and resources made increasingly sophisticated studies of the human body possible, and came with expectations of practical result.

It is this intersection between the goals and interests of a federal agency, and the actual citizen bodies the agency sought to shape, that this dissertation investigates. The early human nutrition work from Agricultural Extension Stations, especially Atwater’s work, give us the 19th century terms on which 20th century nutrition politics would be understood. 19

Scientific Nutrition, Women, and Class

This chapter is not a biography of Dr. Wilbur Atwater. Several short biographies on the man already exist.7 Nor is it an assessment of his individual career or his personal life. Again, others have debated whether he raised his own children as well as he fathered his scientific field, or whether his work was truly original. This is no “great man” story, either. Others have praised

Atwater’s “genius,” “remarkable leadership,” and Jeffersonian virtues.8 Atwater did not develop

American nutrition science all on his own, nor could he have developed it without the institutional and federal support his work received. Atwater was, however, undeniably central to this growth of nutrition science, and it is necessary to follow his career to understand how (and which) American nutrition science moved among university, government, and public audiences, and how nutrition science developed as an American political project. Much of that story, it turns out, can be told through one man and his political networks.

Atwater was a traditionally-trained scientist. He received his doctorate in chemistry from

Yale in 1869. His background was in agricultural science. His work on feed corn and farm nutrition was the first step toward his research on human nutrition. His dissertation on corn feed presaged much of Atwater’s major research. By the late-19th century, many American chemists studied the nutrition of farm animals. The practical implications were immense. Research could help farmers determine the cheapest ways to feed their animals, ways to make larger animals (or to make them larger faster), and ways to better grow feed. For American chemists this was a

7 Leonard A. Maynard, “Wilbur O. Atwater,” A Biographical Sketch, The Journal of Nutrition 78: 1962, 1-9; Gary R. Beecher, Kent K. Stewart, et al., “Legacy of Wilbur O. Atwater: Human Nutrition Expansion at the USDA – Interagency Development of Food Composition Research,” The Journal of Nutrition 139, no. 1, December 2008, 178-184.; J. McBride, B. Nichols, et al., “Wilbur O. Atwater: Father of Nutrition Science,” Agricultural Research 41, no. 6, June 1993, 4-11. 8 William Darby, Nutrition Science: An Overview of American Genius, Agricultural Research Service (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), 10-11. 20 burgeoning, practical field. Its practicality kept it well-funded, including with early federal funding.9

In 1862, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act provided a number of American universities with land for agricultural research and experimental farms.10 The federal government would provide American colleges with resources for conducting agricultural research (so long as the research had practical applications). The basis of the Morrill Act was actually drawn from

German and French models, whose governments already funded agricultural colleges. The research that a well-supported arm of the state could produce might be work “entirely beyond the means of private men,” an American senator observing the European models explained. After much debate (and a veto by President Buchanan), President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act. The result was a flood of federal resources for the selected American colleges. The amount of land granted varied dramatically, with New York state receiving nearly a million acres, and Alabama receiving just under 25,000 acres. In the end, the federal resources from the Act led to the development of new colleges in twenty-five states, and breathed new life into agricultural colleges in every state. The colleges that benefited from the Morrill Act acquired an intimacy with federal government, which remained critical to funding the American agricultural sciences through the 20th century.11

After Atwater left Yale, he traveled to some European nations which already had federal funding for agricultural research. At the University of Leipzig and, especially, the University of

Berlin, Atwater further developed an interest in nutrition research. He was drawn to his German mentors’ seemingly more rigorous scientific method, and their more sophisticated equipment. He

9 Barry M. Popkin, “Agricultural Policies, Food, and Health,” EMBO Reports 12 (2011): 11-18. 10 Milton Conover, The Office of Experiment Stations: Its History, Activities, and Organization, Institute for Government Research, Service Monographs of the United States Government, no. 32, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1924), 16. 11 Conover, Office of Experiment Stations, 1924, 28. 21 was taken with their philosophy of science, especially the idea that scientific truth was always tentative, not absolute. Above all, Atwater also was fascinated by the institutional structure supporting his German mentors. European agricultural extension stations seemed to offer a world of possibilities beyond the traditional university setting.12 Atwater’s admiration for the European model was not unique; it was a moment in which the exchange of ideas between European and

American social reformers flourished.13 The enthused scientists and their backers excitedly copied the German plan, first with a handful of university-affiliated stations, and later (by the late 1870s) with government funded stations independent of other institutions.

Early 19th century European agricultural research had been primarily supported by universities. The first major laboratories were established in Germany in the first decades of the

1800s, including the agricultural chemistry laboratories at the University of Giessen, where

Atwater would visit a half-century later. By the 1840s, prominent agricultural chemistry laboratories were built in Edinburgh (sponsored by a voluntary society) and in Rothamsted,

England (sponsored by a phosphate fertilizer magnate). It was in Germany, once again, that the most critical innovation in the agricultural experiment model began. In the mid-1800s, seventy- five new agricultural experiment stations were opened with public funding. These stations were explicitly separated from universities, and were meant to merge aspects of practical agricultural planning with more technical agricultural chemistry research. Atwater held the German model in high esteem. He made the German arrangement their model for American stations.14

When Atwater returned to the United States he set out to copy the European agricultural experiment station system. Atwater took a couple of temporary positions, and then in 1873 took

12 Kenneth J. Carpenter, “The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater,” Journal of Nutrition 124, no. 9 (September 1994): 1708S. 13 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), 4. 14 W. E. Huffmand and R. E. Evenson, Science for Agriculture: A Long Term Perspective, 2nd ed., (Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2004), 17-18. 22 a permanent job at his alma matter, Wesleyan University. In 1875, he helped to get the first

Agricultural Experiment Station in the country built in Middletown, Connecticut. Atwater spent the next several years running the station and meeting with local farmers while still managing his university research laboratory. There, the dean was irritated that Atwater had grown lax in his teaching responsibilities, and accused Atwater of failing to meet the university’s research standards as his work was more abstract than applicable. The Dean threatened to cut Atwater’s salary. Atwater reportedly began using some of his own funds to cover laboratory costs and maintain the experiment station.15

He did not struggle long, however. In 1877, a project from the United States Commission of Fisheries changed both Atwater’s budget and his subject. It pushed the professor’s study from the food composition of plants to the food composition of aquaculture, or from feed corn to fish.

The federal funding offered great opportunity. For the next three years, Atwater and his student assistants analyzed fish that might be part of a typical American diet. The study pushed

Atwater’s interest in the composition of animal feed easily toward work on the composition of food eaten by humans. After determining the amount of crude protein, ash, and carbohydrates in each of these fish, Atwater began to direct experiments on a diversity of human-consumed foods.

By 1879, he and his students had analyzed 1300 foods.16

The federal research funding brought controversy over how to manage Atwater’s relationship with the state. The dean reportedly disapproved of the use of federal funds in the chemist’s lab. If Atwater was going to conduct practical, non-philosophical, research for the state, he was not going to get any resources from Wesleyan. Atwater was supposedly told that any time he conducted federal research in his college lab he would need to pay the college rent

15 McBride, “Wilbur O. Atwater,” 1993, 7. 16 Carpenter, “The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater,” 1994, 1708S. 23 and maintenance fees for the laboratory space, as well as fees for potential wear to the laboratory floors and furniture.17 Atwater’s job was never truly threatened, but his research funding was in trouble. It became apparent that Atwater would need to keep bringing external funding and resources in if he wanted to continue with the food composition studies. In funding projects with federal level appeal, the government provided support for what was of likely use to it.

Across the Atlantic, the projects with the most appeal were those focused on human, not animal, nutrition. German chemists were absorbed in research on the “calorie.” European calorie studies emerged from projects of trying to understand the human body, especially to understand how it compared to other modern machines. As American and European physiologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to understand the body as a machine, a system of interlocking parts, they also came to understand the body as something improvable. Like technologies of the moment, a human-machine could be assessed and managed piece by piece.18

As German and French chemists tried to rationalize the human body in the late 19th-century, they conceived of it as a study of labor input and output. The laboring body was a machine, and food calories provided an authoritative, quantitative, way of evaluating human physiology. Research in the late 1850s and through the 1860s tried to understand calorie-use in terms of the heat produced by the laboring body, as well as its energy output of said body, evaluating how the human body stood up to the laws of thermodynamics. At the core of this research was the project of evaluating the body through scientific and economic means, assessing input and output, and imagining an ideal management of the human body under carefully calculated rules.19

17 Naomi Aronson, “Nutrition as a Social Problem: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Strategy in Science,” Social Problems 29, no. 5 (June 1982): 476. 18 Carolyn Thomas de la Pena, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: NYU, 2003), 23-25. 19 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: U of California, 1990), 127-130; Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 337-364. 24

Atwater’s new research began with a focus on how many calories were in various food items, and how many calories animals and humans used for different activities. Like the German studies before it, Atwater’s calorie research eventually included studies on how many calories individuals needed daily. From that, it was a short jump to studies on ideal food budgeting. The

Massachusetts Department of Labor hired Atwater specifically to analyze the department’s data on working people’s diets.

The 1870s brought a severe economic Depression, the longest in the nation’s history.

Food prices rose, wages fell. Robert Wiebe has described the 1870s’ depression as uniquely

“distressing but not devastating.” Despite economic strife, Americans held close to ideas of productivity, and thrift, and decried the decadence of urban life, cosmopolitanism, and new consumer goods.20 White men especially were understood to be “over civilized” and effeminate

– a situation some imagined as a threat to whiteness itself.21 Americans needed to cut back and toughen-up to survive, according to the emerging Progressive ethos.

While some wanted to strengthen middle-class white men, others used similar language to criticize the bodies of the urban, often immigrant, working class. Laborers struggling to balance low-wages, long-hours, and high food prices risked becoming inefficient, slacking workers. They might even fall ill – and lose all productivity – if seriously malnourished. Some, like labor statistician Carroll Wright, could not shake the fear that low wages and high food prices made up the perfect formula for social unrest.22

Some historians have thus argued that the introduction of scientific nutrition offered factory owners a way of ensuring that wages could remain static, and that any unrest could be

20 Wiebe, The Search for Order,1967, 4-5. 21 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: Chicago, 1995), 186. 22 Carpenter, “The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater,” 1994, 1710S. 25 eliminated without economic sacrifice. Scientific nutrition offered an alternative to political interventions like price regulations or minimum wage laws.23 Ellen Swallows Richards, the

“mother of American home economics,” and politician Edward Atkinson extensively promoted

Atwater’s work explicitly for its social implications. In a system in which exact amounts of calories and nutrients might be cheaply and efficiently parceled out, everyone could be well-fed, everyone could work hard, and there would be no waste in the process. Atwater and Atkinson imagined a scientific approach to nutrition could teach working class Americans to embrace the cheap cuts of meats, soups and stews, and lower quality flours which they avoided out of “false pride of show.”24

Some working-class activists foresaw danger in the new nutrition science, recognizing elements of “social control” embedded in so intensely rationalizing the body. Eugene Debs told workers to “resist scientific degradation,” a threat of nutrition studies. He argued that nutritionists wanted to ensure American workers would “eat at a cost as low as Chinamen are subjected to.” Some laboring families refused to participate in food studies. According to those conducting the studies, other laboring families intentionally overate when the nutritionist were looking, perhaps believing that if they showed large amounts of food were necessary for maintaining bodies they might use the results to fight for higher wages or lower food prices.25

The effect would be more a more subtle governance than either Debs or the Atwater-ites expected. Dietary rationalization would not need to come by decree, though – the key was that scientific nutrition told women how to manage their families’ health, and that this management could then be internalized, eventually normalized, by American laboring families. Carefully

23 Carpenter, “The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater,” 1994, 1710S-1711S. 24 Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 47. 25 Aronson, “Nutrition as a Social Problem,” 1982, 481-2. 26 planning around the quantified value of nutrients, taking the pecuniary economy of food to heart, could transform the supposedly superstitious immigrant into the imagined rational American.

From Scientific Nutrition to Federal Nutrition

As Atwater chased institutional and financial support, he found that keeping the

Progressive impulses of scientific nutrition front and center could mean more funding for carefully-framed laboratory research. Beginning in 1886, Atwater sold projects of human nutrition as projects of measuring laboring men’s strength. To accomplish this research, he worked with the concept of the “calorie.” A calorie is a unit of measurement, technically the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water up one degree Celsius. For Atwater, it offered a way of making sense of food and physique, of making it simple.26 He studied an assortment of families in Connecticut for protein, fat and carbohydrate intake and use. To the study of calories, Atwater added the idea of “Atwater Units.” Now usually called macronutrient ratios, the general idea was that one gram of fat contains nine calories, one gram of protein contains four calories, and one gram of carbohydrates contains four calories. This idea, still central to contemporary nutrition, allowed Atwater to use the research subjects and studies available not only to understand laboring men’s basic caloric needs, but also how the composition of foods affected laborers’ energy and strength. As one scholar has explained it, it allowed scientists to “rationalize [food] quality.” 27

Atwater believed that the working class “good wife and mother” needed a translated and simplified version of the new gospel of nutrition science. He was primarily concerned about the wives and mothers of the poorest American families, with a special interest in factory workers

26 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale, 1999), 36. 27 Jessica J. Mudry, Measured Meals: Nutrition in America (Albany: SUNY, 2009), 36. 27 and laborers. It was working men who needed the most calories and protein to get through the workday, according Atwater’s research. Yet it was, Atwater explained, “the poor man’s food that is the worst cooked and served at home.”28 Atwater argued that women’s faulty understanding of nutrition was part of the reason American laborers’ had tight food budgets.

The chemist explained that the poorest women often insisted on purchasing the most expensive groceries, presumably because they believed that a high cost indicated high value.

Atwater recounted the complaints of a butcher who observed working-class women chose expensive tenderloin over cheaper round or sirloin cuts of beef. While the tenderloin was pricier, the butcher insisted the sirloin would do just as good a job of feeding a woman’s family. The butcher complained specifically about one seamstress who indignantly asked “do you suppose because I don’t come here in my carriage I don’t want just as good meat as rich folks have?’’29

Her outrage emerged from being told that she was making poor choices for her family. His outrage, in contrast, was directed toward the working woman overstepping class and gender- appropriate boundaries. The male butcher was certain he knew how the woman and her family should eat, as well as how they should spend their funds. Both understood the value of food differently. While the European poor all too often chose food based in taste, pride, and misinformation, Atwater thought, in America these behaviors Atwater understood as poor consumerism were far worse, even an “epidemic.”30 While Atwater spoke of poor consumers generally, women were widely understood as especially poor consumers. Progressives often characterized the female consumer as “emotional” and easy to persuade or trick.31 The dawn of a

28 Atwater, “Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition V,” 1888, 442. 29 Atwater, “Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition V,” 1888, 443. 30 Atwater, “Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition V,” 1888, 444. 31 Goldstein, Creating Consumers, 1912, 39. 28 new, scientific nutrition promised to replace the irrational behavior of foolish women with rational instructions on how to choose foods.

The seamstress’ line about not arriving to the shop in a carriage reminds the reader of what Atwater surely knew: the cuts of meat which women chose had to do with pride, and taste, and was not a problem to be resolved solely through scientific nutrition. It also reminds today’s reader of what likely escaped Atwater; that the process of rendering a tough cut of meat palatable, especially with limited cooking facilities, is far more work than preparing a juicy tenderloin. Atwater’s pecuniary economy of food never considered female labor, however.

Atwater implicitly calculated laboring-class women’s time and effort as zero cost. Any unwillingness to put in the labor was evidence that these women were the poor consumers and homemakers Atwater judged them to be, and further, evidence of their nutritional ignorance.

From this insight came Atwater and his followers’ devotion to nutrition education. Conjuring visions of perfect, rational actors, Atwater imagined a country in which women methodically shopped for the most nutritious, least expensive, foods they could find and fed them to their husbands and sons.

Atwater used this rationalization of the laboring man’s nutrition needs to determine the specifics of how that laboring man’s wife or mother ought to feed the family. While there was never a doubt that Atwater expected a homemaker to fulfill the laboring man’s nutritional needs, he conducted limited research on women’s caloric needs. Typically, he made nutritional estimates based on the much more common studies on male workers. Atwater determined that “a man at moderate muscular work” would serve as the physiological norm. The needs of this “man at work” were based on research on such diverse subjects as New England rowers, Californian football teams, Swedish mechanics, Pittsburgh laborers, American college students, and Japanese 29 professors. 32 Limited studies were available, so Atwater explained the American laborer’s body as a sort of combination of these existing statistics. Then, Atwater determined the nutritional needs of that laboring man’s family through somewhat arbitrary fractions. A thirteen-year-old boy counted as eighty percent of “a man at moderate muscular work.” A twelve year old girl was considered sixty percent of “a man at moderate muscular work.” A man at hard muscular work needed a hundred and twenty percent what the standard man needed, in turn implying the standard man was not working hard.33 This data on caloric needs and macronutrient needs (how much protein, fat, and carbohydrate each man needed) would become the basis of new food plans designed for the poor and working class. Were a married seamstress, as in the earlier story, to follow the new scientific food plans she would understand her foods were interchangeable.

The butcher told the woman she could have put the same amount of food on the table with a cheap cut of meat as with tenderloin. Now Atwater would use nutrition science and quantification to make the argument more convincing: the woman could have served the same grams of fat, protein, and carbohydrates with the cheap cuts as with the sirloin.

While Atwater’s new work aimed to influence nutrition, decisions far beyond his laboratory walls foreshadowed a radical invigoration of American nutrition science. The Hatch

Act of 1887 flooded agricultural research with funding. $15,000 was allocated annually for the development of an Agricultural Experiment Station in each state. 34 While the immediate purpose of Hatch Act funds was to fund a variety of practical agricultural programs, the funding would also bolster research on American nutrition.

32 Wilbur Olin Atwater, Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food, Farmers Bulletin no. 142 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 33-34. 33 Atwater, Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food, 1902, 33-34. 34 Carpenter, “The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater,” 1994, 1711S. 30

Atwater benefited from the new legislation almost immediately. The Act funded an

Office of Experiment Stations (OES), a national office meant to organize and coordinate the work of experiment stations around the country. In 1888, the Secretary of Agriculture gave

Atwater the job of directing this new office. Atwater, the “father of American nutrition,” thus also served as the father of centralized, government-managed agricultural research. As Director, he worked to ensure that new state-level experiment stations were living up to his high research standards. “Stations should do well whatever they attempt,” he explained.35 To accomplish this, the stations were to conduct research as Atwater himself did: focus on one small and socially relevant question, and then conduct meticulous research for as long as it took. The social relevance would be determined by the scientists, with guidance from local farmers that was far greater on paper than in reality. Atwater’s own questions centered on calories and nutrients, and he soon sought to spend more time in the lab and less enmeshed in bureaucracy. Atwater left his position as OES director after two years, returning to Wesleyan in 1891 to again run his nutrition lab. This was not before choosing his next two successors, guaranteeing his imprint remained on the office for decades.

35 H.C. Knoblauch, E.M. Law, et al., State Agricultural Research Stations: A History of Research Policy and Procedure, miscellaneous publication 904 (Washington: Department of Agriculture, 1962), 82-83. 31

Figure 1: Atwater's Respiration Calorimeter, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, Record Group 16, Photo #3395

Atwater left for a new federal position that was created for him. Atwater was now responsible for USDA nutrition science. During the late 19th century, federal attention to nutrition had grown so intense that the subject would no longer be grouped with the rest of agricultural research. It was from this position that Atwater acquired further federal nutrition 32 research funding. He built a human calorimeter, a special enclosed room in which experiments on calorie burn could be conducted on human subjects, beginning with Atwater’s graduate students. Such rooms were previously used to study how cows used energy. Subjects spent days at a time in a fully enclosed cell, receiving food through an airlock, and having all their breath, body heat, and even excrement weighed and measured. The very expensive room, nicknamed the

“Wesleyan glass cage,” gave Atwater data from which he could assess human “wastefulness” and “efficiency” when it came to energy (calorie) use.36

Figure 2: Diagram of Dr. Pettenkofer's (Munich) Respiration Apparatus." Atwater printed the diagram, and later modeled his calorimeter on it. W. O. Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition II," The Century 34, no. 2 (June 1887): p. 242.

The calorimeter experiments proved the basis of most American calorie science for half a century. They also stand as a tangible expression of the new federal research in nutrition science.

The product of this research was the solidification of a shared language of human nutrition, the calorie science to which medical, social and moral measures of nutrition were quickly attached.

36 Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” 2007. 33

With a rationalization of the body, and the process of food consumption, into a process of quantifiable energy use (calorie-burning), it became much simpler to assess just what individuals ought to eat. It also made clear what was excessive. The body as calorie-burning-machine provided a basis on which a “pecuniary economy of food” might be built. Not only could a sirloin be as nutritionally efficient a food as tenderloin, but in fact beans could provide the same grams of protein at a much lower cost. Stale bread, Atwater noted, provided the same calories as fresh bread. Even alcohol was a source of calories, Atwater wrote, earning him scorn from

Temperance Movement leaders. Federal dollars enabled this language of nutrition and the rationalization of the body. Some of the resources were won through a direct appeal to the social possibilities of calorie research, and others came draped in beliefs of laboratory objectivity. In either case, calorie discourse was easily translated into social planning, especially for the laboring classes. From USDA home economists to small and private settlement houses, physiological efficiency was now manageable.

The Class Politics of Nutrition Science

During his years with the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor, and then heading the Office of

Experiment Stations, the professor had come to know the influential Democrat Edward Atkinson.

Atkinson was a wealthy Massachusetts businessman and economist deeply invested in American politics throughout the last quarter of the 19th century. As a close friend of the Secretary of

Agriculture, Atkinson was introduced to the chemist before Atwater was even interested in human nutrition.37 Today, Edward Atkinson is most closely associated with the Anti-Imperialist

League, a group he founded. He penned a series of anti-imperial pamphlets at the turn of the

37 Jacqueline L. Dupont, “Research in the Agricultural Research Service/USDA: Introduction and Early History,” Journal of Nutrition 139, no. 1 (January 2009): 171-172. 34 century. Pamphlets like “The Hell of War and its Penalties” detailed his belief that American involvement in the Philippines was fiscally irresponsible. This economic take on social problems would characterize his work with Atwater, as well.

Atkinson’s political interests in the 1880s stemmed from an economic conservatism mixed with a political Progressivism. Historians have spent nearly a century trying to understand just how to characterize the politics of the Progressive Era. 38 While some scholars began with an understanding of the Progressive Movement as a single, coherent body of thought and action, by the early 1960s most scholars agreed that this “Progressive Movement” never existed. Instead, a number of different stands existed, with politics as unique as their interests. Progressives could be Social Darwinists or public health advocates, they could be fighting for labor rights or for the

Taylorization of the workplace, for anti-imperialism or eugenics. The Progressive views of

Atkinson might be best described as pro-business and pro-order. Atkinson himself had made his money in New England cotton mills, and later in the insurance business. He sought to reform and manage society, but not to break down class barriers. He aggressively opposed the same organized labor movements and social safety nets other Progressives embraced.39 For him, scientific nutrition appeared a gift, an essential tool for social management. It not only had the potential to quell unrest over the cost of living, but also to label workers (and male workers’ wives) responsible for their own success or poverty on an intimate, moral, and biological level.

38 For early representations of Progressives as crusaders against big business, see Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931). For interpretations of Progressives as desperate climbers, anxious about their social status in a changing world, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955). Gabriel Kolko portrayed the Progressives as champions of big business and big government, at the expense of individual American freedoms in The Triumph of Conservatism (1963). Ultimately, historians like Samuel Hays (The Response to Industrialism, 1957) and Robert Wiebe (The Search for Order, 1967) picked apart the idea of a coherent “Progressive Movement” at all. Instead, they highlighted the existence of various strands of Progressivism, often with conflicting politics. 39 Hamilton Cravens, “Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA: Ellen Swallows Richards and her Allies,” Agricultural History 64, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 126. 35

Atkinson’s dream of scientific nutrition was essentially the nightmare scenario which Eugene

Debs had written about.

Figure 3: The Science of Nutrition, Ed. Edward Atkinson, p. 124.

Back in 1887, Atkinson arranged for Wilbur Atwater to pen a recurring column on nutrition for Century Magazine. The magazine’s upper-middle class readership, fans of

Progressive-style thinking and politics, would thus be introduced to scientific nutrition, or what

Atwater described as “a science of physical reproduction of labor power.”40 The social implications of this federally-funded research were clear. American bodies, especially American laboring bodies, could be optimized. In his articles for The Century, printed in 1887 and 1888,

Atwater introduced his audience to what he described as “the body as a sort of machine.”41

40 Aronson, “Nutrition as a Social Problem,” 1982, 478. 41 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition II: How Food Nourishes Our Bodies,” Century 34, no. 2 (June 1887): 238. 36

Figure 4: W. O. Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition III: The Potential Energy of Food," The Century 34, no. 3 (July 1887): 242.

Although Atwater grasped some of the larger social implications of his work, his earliest articles in The Century focused on technical nutrition science over politics. The professor discussed heat and energy, protein, and food waste. He recounted nutrition studies in excruciating technical detail, while assuring his readers that he was avoiding scientific jargon and simplifying his research for the venue. Atwater promised his readers – accustomed to reading short stories and philosophical essays in this magazine – that they would thank him for how simple his science was were they to try reading other nutrition science.

Even in recounting technical studies, in ways in which the scientist believed reflected the neutrality of his scientific lens, Atwater frequently conflated nutrition research with social truth.

In one section of a piece on the potential energy, Atwater laid out research studies on canine energy use. He described the calories, or potential energy, spent by dogs in open and confined 37 spaces. Without introducing other evidence, then, Atwater concluded that “that the human body should thus be proved to use its food with such perfect chemical economy is … one more fact to add to the long lists that are bringing the functions of life more and more within the domain of ordinary physical and chemical law.”42 The leap becomes more significant given that Atwater then uses calculations based in the dog studies to make conclusions about human food needs.

“By these calculations,” he wrote, “a pound of wheat flour contains as much energy, to be converted into the heat which a laboring man needs to keep his body warm, and muscular strength to do his work, as two pounds of lean beef free from bone.” 43 The conflation of species and large leaps of logic were a product of their time – limited resources and less-than-strict professional standards in late 19th century American science. Still, the implications of this approach were significant. It went beyond the gauche equivalency drawn between laboring men and dogs, and the implied animalistic behaviors of the laborer. The real implication was that based in Atwater’s assumption of equivalency, he could use these rough, non-human studies to declare poor men could be fed equally well (in terms of calories) by cheap bread or expensive meat.44 Wages did not need to be raised; food prices did not need to be regulated: the health and efficiency of American labor was in its own wives’ and mothers’ hands.

Atwater’s belief about what his research might do seemed to change as he spent longer with Atkinson. In the fifth installment, Atwater ventured directly into the social implications of his research. The point of nutrition science, at least for this audience, was to learn “how we may select and use our food-materials to the best advantage of health and purse.”45 Only then did he

42 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition III: The Potential Energy of Food,” Century 34, no. 3 (July 1887): 402. 43 Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition III,” 404. 44 Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition III,” 404. 45 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition I: The Composition of Our Bodies,” The Century 34, no. 1 (May 1887): 60. 38 begin making explicit moral judgments about diet and declare the poor coal laborer who boasts of giving his family “the best of flour, the finest sugar, the very best quality of meat” extravagant, inefficient, and ignorant. Atwater then offered up data (both his own and that borrowed from his German mentor, Carl von Voit) on the cost and value of different foods. The piece focused on the physiology of an “average man, engaged in moderately hard muscular work,” and what this man needed to “maintain his body in vigorous condition and supply strength for the work he has to do.”46 Although Atwater began his agricultural and even his early human research from a purportedly objective standpoint – body as machine – his writing in The

Century makes clear that he had come to wholeheartedly embrace the social and political implications of the quantified body. This would prove especially true when the body being measured belonged to poorer Americans.

The Century was not the only venue that Atkinson provided for Atwater. Atkinson pushed Atwater’s career forward and made the professor’s research more politically useful.

Atkinson was close to influential men, notably President Grover Cleveland and Secretary of

Agriculture J. Sterling Morton. In mid-1894, the USDA reorganized its distribution of Hatch Act funds in the name of modernizing the AES system.47 Atkinson heavily influenced the development of a new $10,000 Office of Experiment Stations allocation solely for nutrition research.48 Naturally, Atwater would be at the helm of these new nutrition projects.

Atwater’s first major USDA publication would begin as a nutrition science and end as the

1894 “Foods: Nutritive Value and Cost.” The twenty-six page booklet explained that the body

46 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition V: The Pecuniary Economy of Food," The Century 35, no. 3 (January 1888): 438. 47 Cravens, “Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA,” 1990, 127. 48 McBride, “Wilbur O. Atwater: Father of Nutrition Science.” 1994, 5. 39 was like a steam engine, except the body’s fuel was food.49 With this explanation of why nutrition mattered established, Atwater formally laid out the idea of Atwater Units, the idea that the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates (the three macronutrients) in a food needed to be considered along with calories to calculate food values. Early in the bulletin Atwater explained that a mix of meat (protein and fat calories) and bread (mostly carbohydrate calories) made for a far healthier diet than the same number of calories sourced from only one macronutrient. This

1894 publication became the first federal voice on human nutrition meant to directly reach a public readership.50

Figure 5: Fuel Value of Foods, Wilbur Olin Atwater, Methods and Results on the Investigations of Chemistry and Economy of Food (Washington: Government Printing Office), 138.

49 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “Food: Nutritive Value and Cost,” Farmers Bulletin No. 23, US Department of Agriculture (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1894), 3, 7. Box 2, Wilbur O. Atwater Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscripts, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. 50 Nancy Duran, “Farmer’s Bulletins Advice to Women on Diet, Food, and Cooking,” Journal of Agriculture and Food Information 61, no. 1 (2004): 52. 40

By 1897, funding for nutrition research at American AES was raised to $15,000 annually.

While only two percent of the Office of Experiment Station’s budget, the amount exceeded previous allocation.51 Then, Atwater’s 1894 pamphlet on nutrition was reissued and renamed.

Formerly “Foods: Nutritive Value and Cost,” the 1902 edition was dubbed the more authoritative

“Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Values of Food.” In it, Atwater passed bold judgment on

American diets, especially on the presumed overspending of poor housewives. Too often “we endeavor to make our diet suit our palate by paying high prices in the market,” he wrote, “rather than by skillful cooking and tasteful serving at home.”52 The gendered labor of that “skillful cooking and tasteful serving” was implied but unspoken. A.C. True, then Director of Experiment

Stations (a former assistant of Atwater’s), introduced the revised pamphlet with great attention to its political and social implications. Before Americans’ spending habits can be “permanently improved,” True wrote, studies such as Atwater’s were critical in helping us “to learn the errors which are commonly made in their domestic economy.”53 Americanized nutrition science, meant to rationalize women’s role in the “domestic economy,” would remain a powerful political project.

Nutrition Science and Home Economics

Atwater’s contributions to American nutrition science had a lasting impact. Requests for his work still came in to the Office of Experiment Stations decades after Atwater’s 1907 death.

51 Gerald F. Combs, “Celebration of the Past: Nutrition at USDA,”1994, 1729S. 52 Atwater, Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food, 1902, 44-45. 53 A. C. True, letter of transmittal for Dietary Studies in New York City in 1896 and 1897, US Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin 116 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 3. 41

The Secretary of Agriculture received requests for food composition charts from sources as diverse as US Senators, Better Baby Contests, the Army, and Cosmopolitan Magazine.54

Longer lasting still was Atwater’s impact on a number of American reformers. In particular, his work directly influenced prominent home economists who would become important in body politics. Early home economics activists, like Ellen Swallows Richards, worked directly with Atwater. Another generation, including prominent nutritionist Caroline

Figure 6: Ellen Swallow Richards, home economics movement leader, Library of Congress, LC-B2- 3895-10

54 Carl Vrooman to D.F. Houston, 14 May 1915, 54, College Park, Maryland, National Archives, Record Group 16: Secretary of Agriculture, Entry 15, Volume 5; B.T. Galloway to Sen. Morris Sheppard, 8 April 1914, 44, College Park, Maryland, National Archives, Record Group 16: Secretary of Agriculture, Entry 15, Volume 4; D.F. Houston to Sec. of War, 9 May 1914, p. 76, College Park, Maryland, National Archives, Record Group 16: Secretary of Agriculture, Entry 15, Volume 4. 42

Hunt, learned nutrition science by working under him. Others, including his own daughter Helen

Atwater, based all the assumptions of their own research and writing on the senior Atwater’s publications. Some of these women carried this work into other federal agencies. These included the Office of Home Economics (1915-1922) and the Bureau of Home Economics (1923-1953).

Out of the Office of Experiment Station work toward understanding and “fixing” American nutrition habits emerged federal offices able to spread similar ideas to a much broader audience.

Richards was been dubbed the “mother of home economics,” but her roots lay in laboratory chemistry not so different than Wilbur Atwater’s own methods. She taught sanitary chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There she met Edward Atkinson, who served as a trustee of the university. Atkinson encouraged Richards more toward work in industrial sanitation, which led her into the social problems of industrial America. Atkinson introduced Richards to Atwater. Richards was impressed by Atwater’s research, and the potential uses of such work in efficiently addressing the needs of poor Americans. Atwater, in turn, warmed to Richards’ social Darwinist views about class politics. Richards advocated for a racialized science of poverty, a science that defined the nutritional needs of different races and made assumptions about the ability of various groups to adhere to recommended dietary standards.55

Richards used the new nutrition science as she helped shape the early American home economics movement. Atkinson funded the establishment of Richards’ “Women’s Laboratory,” a path-breaking home economics laboratory at MIT. She used the Women’s Laboratory to promote rational and efficient models for family consumption. “It is…not too much to say that women are,” Richards wrote, “the stumbling blocks in the way of higher industrial, social, and

55 Hamilton Cravens, “Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA: Ellen Swallows Richards and her Allies,” Agricultural History 64, no. 2 (Spring 1990): p. 128-9. 43 ethical progress.”56 These women had been trained to keep the house a sanctuary outside of industry, she argued, and they needed an education in embracing modernity.57 In projects like

“Dietaries for Wage-Earners and Their Families,” the home economist and chemist sought to make calories part of the everyday language of American women.58 According to Richards, the best use of nutrition funding was anything that could “serve the people by helping them secure good food and by teaching them to like it, so they will be willing to prepare it.”59 Richards used the Domestic Laboratory to educate middle-to-upper class American women. She also believed, however, that working class women could be directly trained in the basics of scientific nutrition.60 Through her New England Kitchen, for instance, Richards both produced food for sale (for example, soups that fit her understanding of good nutrition, sold at subsidized prices), and advocated for greater attention to nutrition among her working class customers. Atkinson and Richards collaborated on the creation of the New England Kitchen. The Kitchen offered working women the opportunity to cook for their families under the supervision of middle-class nutrition experts using Atwater’s reports.61 While the paternalistic kitchen program failed,

Richards’ alliance with Atwater’s science and Atkinson’s politics proved one thing: nutrition science and social welfare fit together easily in Richards’ imagination.

Richards further used her social welfare resources to provide Atwater with new data for his human nutrition studies. Americans living in poverty, those who already had a relationship

56 Ellen H. Richards, “Domestic Science as a Synthetic Study for Girls,” Reprinted from Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1898, 773. 57 Richards, “Domestic Science as a Synthetic Study for Girls,” 1898, 769. 58 Ellen H. Richards, Dietaries for Wage-Earners and Their Families, State Board of Health of New Jersey, 17th Report, 1893. 59 Edward Atkinson, ed., The Science of Nutrition: Treatise Upon the Science of Nutrition (Boston: Damrell and Upham, 1896), 198. 60 Levine, School Lunch Politics, 2008, 20. 61 Andrew F. Smith, Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine (New York: Columbia, 2009), 15-17. Smith acknowledges that the Richards-Atkinson-Atwater partnership is about using nutrition for labor efficiency and assimilation, but he still portrays the trio as well meanings Progressive reformers. Hervey Levenstein, in contrast, offers a scathing critique of all three, especially Richards. See Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 2003, 44-59. 44 with the social services, made for readily-available subjects. Caroline Hunt, a resident of the Hull

House settlement in Chicago, conducted studies of economical diets under Atwater’s supervision in 1894. Hunt trained under Ellen Richards at MIT, and Richards introduced her to Atwater.62

The diet studies helped launch Hunt’s scientific career. Hunt also saw an opportunity in rewriting the results of these studies specifically for American mothers. In 1903, Hunt explained that

“scientists have calculated and given us in the form of dietaries which tell us how many ounces of nitrogeous matter, how many of fat, and how many of carbohydrates a person ought to eat each day. These dietaries are, however, quite unintelligable to the laity. There is a need of persons to come between the scientists and the laity, persons who shall understand the language of the scientists, and be able to translate it into appetizing bills of fare.”63 Hunt believed her role was not only to make nutrition information understandable but to make it appealing, going a step beyond Atwater’s sterner scientific dictates.64 She published a book on problems of the

American home in 1908, and then a popular educational pamphlet on feeding children in 1912.65

During these same years, Atwater deeply influenced another young government nutritionist: his daughter. Helen Atwater grew up around the Storrs Experiment Station and the

Office of Experiment Stations. She studied chemistry herself, earning her bachelor’s from Smith

College in 1897. She worked as her father’s assistant until his death in 1907. She also edited nutrition studies for the Office of Experiment Stations, making laboratory research potentially more accessible. Helen Atwater pursued calorimetry and the social implications of nutrition

62 Goldstein, Creating Consumers, 2012, 32; 63 Caroline Hunt, “More Physical Vigor for All,” Chautauquan (February 1903): 118. 64 Jessica Mudry has argued that the birth of scientific nutrition and quantification effectively destroyed Americans’ relationship with taste and desire, instead re-making eating into a technical task. As the concerns of federal scientists and nutrition-promoters like Hunt exemplify, however, a vision of cold, calculating nutrition replacing some pre-modern, holistic relationship between the diner and the diet is far too simplistic. 65 Caroline Hunt, Home Problems from a New Standpoint (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1908); Caroline Hunt, Food for Young Children, Farmers’ Bulletin 717 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), 4. Originally published in 1916. 45 studies while working under her father, and continued these projects after taking a position at the

Office of Home Economics. The younger Atwater helped direct nutrition research for the young federal agency for nearly fifteen years.

Helen Atwater worked alongside Caroline Hunt, the woman who had helped the senior

Atwater with his settlement house studies, at the Office of Home Economics for nearly fifteen years. Hunt joined the staff of the Office of Experiment Stations in 1910, a few years after

Wilbur Atwater’s death. It was there that Hunt wrote her 1916 booklet Food for Young Children, also known as USDA Farmer’s Bulletin 717. Food for Young Children is credited with introducing the concept of food groups to the public. As research like Wilbur Atwater’s work on macronutrients and the new 1910s research on vitamins demonstrated, discussing calories alone could not provide adequate or up-to-date nutrition advice for the public. In an attempt at making the increasingly complex realm of nutrition science more consumable, Hunt introduced five groupings: starchy foods and cereals, eggs and flesh foods, fruits and vegetables, sweets, and fats. In grouping grains, Hunt suggested grain foods were nutritionally interchangeable: all provided calories and Vitamin B. Likewise, all the “flesh foods” provided a combination of iron and protein. Fruits and vegetables might also “be used to a certain extent interchangeably,” based on the cost of various items at the time.66 As Atwater had explained that cheap steaks provided as much nutrition as fancy cuts, Hunt made an even sharper equivalency. Diagramming the flesh foods as equivalent, for instance, provided helpful guidelines for anyone trying to consume all their vitamins on the cheap. It also provided new expectations for dietary balance and frugality.

A mother might do especially well for her family by following these new USDA pamphlets, or a mother might fail her family by not changing her shopping or cooking habits in the face of carefully illustrated food groups.

66 Caroline Hunt, Food for Young Children, 1916. 46

Hunt’s pamphlets carried Wilbur Atwater’s beliefs about nutrition, especially about the social implications of nutrition, to a new generation. She described the body as a machine, and reiterated a Progressive belief in maximizing “the efficiency of the human body.” 67 Hunt pushed for this optimization of the body with a heightened attention to mothers’ responsibility for their family’s nutrition. Wilbur Atwater had lamented the ignorance of mothers about nutrition in

1888, and now in 1916 his student would raise expectations further. At the end of Food for

Young Children, Hunt poses a list of questions every mother could use to evaluate how well she did at feeding her children:

If I gave the child more than [two] ounces of flesh food, should I have better used the money on fruits and vegetables? Was the child given sweets or snacks between meals? Was he allowed to eat sweets when he should have been drinking milk or eating cereals, meat, eggs, fruit, or vegetables?68

In 1917, Hunt and Helen Atwater co-authored an agricultural bulletin on selecting foods for an adequate family diet.

By 1920, Caroline Hunt and others were taking this to the next level. She started to describe separating food groups not just as a way of casually balancing nutrients, or a way of deciding that apples and oranges were equally nutritious so choose based on price…instead, this was the beginning of breaking it down into 100-calorie charts. So, a mother could precisely decide which foods were best. It was a leap forward in linking food and money. It also was a major new step in determining what the state could expect (or demand) of mothers/families in making those decisions. This evolution in nutrition advice came with increased expectations of laywomen’s nutrition work and food budgeting. Advice like this, exemplified by the checklist detailed above, may come off as condescending. The specifically maternal pressure managed to

67 Caroline Hunt, Revaluations (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1929). Originally published in 1901. 68 Hunt, Food for Young Children, 1920, 26. 47 guarantee that such advice would be internalized as the new rules of good mothering, though, not taken as state mandate.

In 1923, when the Office of Home Economics reorganized as the Bureau of Home

Economics, Helen Atwater left government work and become an editor of the Journal of Home

Economics (run by Ellen Richards’ organization, the American Home Economics Association).69

As editor of the profession’s flagship publication, Atwater was able to keep nutrition science, especially the calorie and macronutrient work so central to her father’s career, visible in the broad Progressive project of home economics.

Conclusion

Wilbur Atwater and the early Office of Experiment Stations laid the foundation for federal intervention into physique. The precedent they set was two-fold. Their work began to popularize nutrition science, simultaneously defining it as an arena for the participation of laywomen and federal government. First, the establishment of the nutrition section in the Office of Experiment Stations and the federal funding of Atwater’s calorie research signaled the acceptance of human nutrition science. While Atwater published some of his work in public venues like The Century, it would be the work of home economists that truly spread calories and macronutrients. Home economists teaching in high schools and universities or working in industry began translating these concepts. In just a couple decades, the language of the laboratory would be the language of the well-informed housewife.

At this late 19th-century moment of research innovation and public attention, nutrition science would also become an accepted discourse of the federal government. It offered a number

69 Atwater, Helen Woodard, ed. by Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer. In Notable American Women, 1607-1950, Volume I: A-F, ed. by Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 48 of benefits. Through this work, American bodies and health could be discussed in calories and pounds, and in grams of fat, carbohydrates and protein. Nutrition science provided the language that could bring the citizen body into the realm of policy, the language that made the individual body’s weight and size manageable on a larger scale.

The development of the nutrition section and Wilbur Atwater’s laboratory not only provided the language of future political interventions into the body, it also provided a precedent for action. Helen Atwater, Caroline Hunt, and other federally-employed nutrition advocates in the 1920s worked with Atwater’s research to prepare food plans for Americans, especially low- income Americans. Ellen Richards’ home economics movement and the birth of the Bureau of

Home Economics represent one direction taken. Women like Hunt literally moved from

Atwater’s laboratory to that of the Office of Home Economics. The Office of Home Economics, founded in 1915 within the Department of Agriculture’s States Relations Service, was a direct product of Atwater and Atkinson winning federal funding for human nutrition research a decade before.70 The Office of Home Economics then was transformed into the more stable Bureau of

Home Economics in 1923. I will return to those women, their research, and their federal agency in Chapter Three.

For now, I turn to another set of professional women influenced by the Atwater laboratory. Employees of the United States Children’s Bureau shared the general concerns of

Atwater, Atkinson, and Richards. They wanted a way of managing poverty, especially urban immigrant poverty. While Atkinson sought ways to strengthen male laborers, Julia Lathrop of the Children’s Bureau believed that improving the health of children would improve the next

70 “Explanation of the Work of the Office of Home Economics, made at a meeting of the Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council, January 19, 1921, to consider the work of the Washington Evening Clinic for Women,” Folder: Mss., Box 594, Entry 5, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 49 generation of workers. The origins of these groups are intertwined. The Children’s Bureau emerged from the Settlement House Movement. Atwater had conducted studies on the children of Hull House, the settlement house where Julia Lathrop had worked. All existed within a

Progressive Era network of chemistry and social science, of expertise for a higher good, and of a belief in managing and controlling the country through quantification. The Children’s Bureau would pick up a number of ideas from the nutrition section, and the greatest imprint would be evident in the way the Bureau discussed health, fitness, and the human body. The Bureau embraced quantification as the means to improving the body, as the other Progressives had done.

Instead of calories, though, the Children’s Bureau would champion “height” and “weight” measurement as the path to a stronger nation. 50

Chapter 2

“A Woman’s Work to Know about Children”: Voluntary Labor for the Children’s Bureau, 1912-1928

Wilbur Atwater’s success at the turn of the century led to government funding for nutrition research, and a modest expansion in bureaucracy to accompany this project. Federal involvement in citizen health and physique grew in the following years, as other agencies embraced Atwater’s initiatives and methods. In 1921, fifteen years after Atwater’s death, one of those agencies took a leap forward in its body project. The Children’s Bureau, staffed with women who worked on issues related to food composition and health, pushed a remarkable piece of health legislation through Congress. The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection

Act called for more attention to child health and mortality rates, and provided the Children’s

Bureau with the resources to address the issue. The Act provided matching funds to states for the development of health clinics. States could do what they wanted with their matching funds, and the actual public health work in Sheppard-Towner clinics would be done by local, not federal, employees.1 This Act is what people are most likely to think of when they think of the Children’s

Bureau. Sheppard-Towner is remembered as a radical step forward for both women in government and public health work. It is also remembered for its 1929 death at the hands of the

American Medical Association.2As a result, the Act has also been a fixture in narratives of the

1 Julia Lathrop on Sheppard-Towner, Congress, House, 67th cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (18 November 1921), 7949; Sen. Morris Sheppard on Sheppard-Towner, Congress, Senate, 66th cong., 3rd sess., Congressional Record (17 Dec. 1920), 455. 2 See: Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap, 1995); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890- 1930 (Urbana-Champaign: Illinois, 1994); Sheila M. Rothman, “Women’s Clinics or Doctor’s Offices?: The Sheppard-Towner Act and the Promotion of Preventative Health Care,” in Social History and Social Policy (New York: Academic Press, 1981). 51 early 20th century professionalization of American medicine and of the medicalization of maternity. In a number of literatures, then, the act is evoked as evidence of “an important precedent illustrating that even limited government intervention could contribute to improving the lives of mothers and children.”3 Historians now understand the 1921 Act as a turning point in social welfare history, and as a momentous step towards the creation of a New Deal state.4

While Sheppard-Towner was a milestone, I argue that the earlier, lesser known body projects of the Children’s Bureau were at least as important. It was the advisory projects of the

Bureau which laid the groundwork for Sheppard-Towner and other body projects. More than just a predecessor to better-funded programming, though, the Bureau’s advisory health projects were themselves a pioneering state intervention into the health and bodies of Americans. In the process of implementing the advisory project, the Children’s Bureau built networks of volunteers and reshaped the discourse around child health and physique. The Bureau employed voluntary programming to implement its health program before it had the funds or Congressional support for the Sheppard-Towner Act. It used programming, the voluntary labor of women, and an

Atwater-inspired quantification of the body for events like child health conferences, Baby Week, and the Children’s Year. Grace Abbott, later Chief of the Children’s Bureau, explained that while Bureau work was not always interventionist, it had “furnished the facts on which action was frequently based.”5 The volunteerism of each of its sponsored events was critical to advisory state technique. The Bureau could rely on many middle-class mothers showing up at Baby Week

3 Milton Kotelchuck, “Safe Mothers, Healthy Babies: Reproductive Health in the Twentieth Century,” in Silent Victories: The History and Practice of Public Health in Twentieth Century America, ed. John W. Ward and Christian Warren (NY: Oxford, 2007), 112; Kristen Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood: The US Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46 (Urbana-Champaign: Illinois, 1997), 76. 4 For a critiques of the middle class bias of the work done under the Act, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989). For a critique of how the Act perpetuated racial and ethnic discrimination, see portions of Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, esp. 183-4. 5 Quoted in Eleanor Taylor, On Behalf of Mothers and Children: The Story of the Children’s Bureau (Washington: National League of Women Voters, 1930), 45. 52 or Children’s Year events. Participation in such events was of course not a legal obligation. It was, however, a gendered social one. A federal call to improve child health and nutrition – not just for themselves but for the good of the entire nation – was a compelling opportunity for middle and working-class women to demonstrate their patriotism in a gender appropriate manner. As such, participating in child health conferences and events became the women’s work of government.

This chapter considers the role of three Children’s Bureau programs in the development of federal body politics. First, I consider the child health conferences promoted by the Bureau between 1914 and 1918. These conferences were the Children’s Bureau’s attempt to end child contests around the country, and replace them with health “conferences,” which were similar events but with specific child-judging guidelines and a public health agenda. Second, I look at the rise of a national “Baby Week,” events held in 1916 and 1917. Finally, I examine the culmination of these projects through the 1919 Children’s Year. Health conferences, Baby

Weeks, and the national Children’s Year all relied heavily on voluntary female labor, which was compelled through gendered expectations of supervising child hygiene. To make over this voluntary female labor in the professional image of the Children’s Bureau, the decentralized conferences were organized with standardized, quantified Bureau materials.

Children’s Health and the Bureau

At its1912 creation, the Children’s Bureau was charged with very specific tasks. It was

“to investigate and report” on child health and welfare. Its staff was to collect statistics, perform studies, and publish their findings. With fifteen employees and less than $26,000, the possibility of any ambitious projects was severely restricted. Some have argued that legislators viewed the 53

Bureau as purely symbolic.6 The Children’s Bureau would gain moderate authority in the area of child labor by the late 1910s. In the terrain of children’s health and bodies, however, the Bureau only encouraged women to undertake its health proposals. The Children’s Bureau was not supposed to involve itself in the “medical” aspects of health, including anything that had to do with disease or illness. That was the fiercely guarded terrain of the growing American Medical

Association and the Public Health Service. Barred from the world of disease, illness, and medicine, the Bureau’s child health campaigns relied on the quantitative language of height and weight as a stand-in for child “health.”

Julia Lathrop and the Children’s Bureau relied on advisory, not directive, programming in most of their body projects. They used the voluntary labor of mothers, teachers, and nurses across the country. They also had strict limits as to which aspects of human health and wellness were within the Bureau’s jurisdiction. The Bureau addressed this problem through the adoption of height-weight tables. In turning the ambiguous concept of “health” into quantified, definitive, and expert height-weight tables, the Bureau both broadened the scope of what concerns it could legitimately address and made it easier for non-experts to voluntarily do the work of the Bureau.

6 Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 1994, 76-78. 54

Figure 1: Julia Lathrop, first Chief of the Children's Bureau, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Bain Collection - Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-111462

Julia Lathrop, the settlement house and juvenile justice reformer turned Bureau Chief, waned to understand the ills facing American children. At the turn of the century, these were many. The 1910 census spoke to the problem: over 150,000 American infants dead each year.

Lathrop believed the census number, which left out many immigrant and poor urban citizens, was a severe undercount of the infant mortality problem. Lathrop estimated that 300,000

American infants and toddlers died every year.7 More disturbing was that half of these deaths could have been avoided with modest child hygiene measures. For reformers like Lathrop, these

7 George W. Coleman, Meeting Notes, November 13, 1914, in Transactions of the American Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, 266. 55 measures included what they viewed as proper child nutrition, breastfeeding, cleanliness, and visits to physicians. According to Lathrop, child mortality rates could be solved “with methods which are in the reach of every community.”8 The women of the Children’s Bureau, most of whom had come to government by way of reform work, set out to truly understand child mortality, poverty, and health problems. They focused on urban immigrants living in broken- down tenements. They also focused on rural women raising children in poverty as American farms suffered in a changing economy. The Bureau became especially invested in rural women giving birth and raising children far from doctors and even further from hospitals.

For the scientific-minded Bureau women, the difficulty of accessing medical intervention was a problem.9 Social science was a prized tool of the Bureau reformers, which they used to prove the validity of their concerns. The “infant mortality thermometer” pictured below vividly illustrated the Bureau’s statistics on child death. These sorts of visuals were regular features of

Bureau campaign. The Children’s Bureau reformers set out to do more than just understand the problems of American children, though. Although it was beyond their official purpose, Lathrop and the Bureau women sought to actively improve the lives of these mothers and children through their advice and instruction.

8 Rep. Frank Barlett Willis speaking on Department of Labor Appropriations, on April 16, 1914, to the House, 63rd Congress, 2nd session, Congressional Record, p. 6809-6810; Julia Lathrop, “The Children’s Bureau,” American Journal of Sociology 18, no. 3 (November 1912) 322. 9 Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935 (New Haven: Yale, 2006), 88-89. 56

Figure 2: Children's Bureau research on infant mortality, appx. 1917 (uses 1916 data). Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-20710 The Bureau had limited financial, personnel, and political resources with which to institute directive programming. In response, the Bureau staff presented their ideas to mothers, teachers, and other caregivers with the expectation these individuals would voluntarily follow- through on Bureau suggestions. The Bureau relied on the efforts of existing voluntary and professional networks of women, and attempted to shape local groups’ and individual women’s child health practices. The Bureau itself could not require that this research, or any of the

Bureau’s goals for child health and hygiene, be implemented. It instead succeeded at getting women’s groups, teachers, and other local groups to fund and disseminate advisory policy. Using these tools of the advisory state – Child Health Conferences, Baby Week, and the Children’s 57

Year – the Bureau reached hundreds of thousands of American families in the 1910s and early

1920s.

As the Bureau set out to reach women through advisory programming, it needed otherwise untrained women to become authoritative figures on health and wellness in their local communities. It needed them to do this quickly, and to do it convincingly. It would need to be a short-cut of some sort, as the Bureau was in no position to send the thousands of women who would lead local community health projects to medical school. The Bureau also needed a way to raise the credibility and authority of this army of (mainly) non-expert women, who would do the

Bureau’s work of managing child health in cities and towns around the nation. The non-expert women might seem suspect in a country increasingly obsessed with professionalism and expertise.10 Finally, the Bureau had to address health issues without upsetting professional organizations like the American Medical Association and the Public Health Service. Both groups conceived of the woman-run Children’s Bureau as a gendered “helping” agency, not a medical one. Whenever the Bureau crossed over the line and became too hands-on or was otherwise a threat to more established health and medical organizations, these organizations became vocal critics of the Bureau.

Given these limitations, the Children’s Bureau came to rely on measuring children as the means for determining their health. Height-weight tables became a favorite tool of the Bureau.

The use of tables greatly simplified the idea of health for both the Bureau designing health programs and the Bureau audiences charged with implementing health programming themselves.

Charts suggested expertise and authority, but were still lay tools that did not encroach on medical territory.

10 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in 20th Century US History (Princeton: Princeton, 2002), 3. 58

The advisory projects of the Children’s Bureau were enabled through the broad use of quantification and the promotion of physical standards. Height-weight tables or charts are designed to quickly evaluate physique and the ratio of one's height to one’s weight. Some described them as “slide rules” of nutrition.11 A common design for such charts, created by Dr.

Thomas Wood, is pictured on the next page. The chart includes one axis of heights and another of boys’ ages. In the Wood chart, a mother might evaluate her 64 inch (5’4”) boy. On the left, she locates the 64” mark. She drags her finger horizontally across the chart, stopping her finger when it is below the boy’s age. If her boy is thirteen years old, then, he might weight 115 pounds. That would be average. Some list average height and weights, others list so-called ideal height and weight combinations. In the early twentieth-century the average and ideal statistics were often handled the same way. When a mother or teacher compared a child’s weight with its height using one of these tables, she generally hoped to find that the child was of “average” build. If the mother discussed above found her boy weighed more or less than the 115 pound average then she would know he was above or below the average. In another decade, height- weight charts would begin replacing the single number (the 115 pounds) with a range of weights one might aim to be. The charts of the 1910s and 1920s, however, were built on the understanding there was a single, specific amount which all boys or girls of a certain age should weigh.12

With this knowledge, with the clear quantitative evidence that her son was too small (or, less frequently in these decades, too large), the mother could remedy the situation. With a tape measure in one hand and the Thomas Wood chart in another, the mother was now responsible

11 C. M. Kelley, “A ‘Nutrition’ and Intelligence Quotient Slide Rule” The Journal of the American Medical Association 80, no. 6 (February 10th, 1923): 397-398. 12 Robert Woodbury to Miss Steever, 14 May 1925, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 277, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland 59 both for the boy’s physique and for improving it. This was the power of height-weight tables.

They were simple columns of numbers which compelled action on behalf of the women using them. The numbers looked objective and authoritative. The single average weight allowed for

Figure 3: Bird Baldwin Table, Bird T. Baldwin, “Weight-Height-Age Standards in Metric Units for American-Born Children,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 8, no. 1 (January- March 1925), 3. 60 each height and age left no room for error. It produced two categories of people: those with average physique and those with above or below average – now defined as “abnormal” – physique. Although the average weight was not statistically correlated with ideal health, in practical use the average weight was used as the ideal weight on charts of the 1910s-1920s.13

The Children’s Bureau used these tables both to assess and to promote child health. The

Bureau adopted tables which were a mixture of Thomas Wood’s and those of another child health research, Bird T. Baldwin.14 Baldwin’s tables focused on children under six years of age, while Wood’s focused on children and teens between six and adulthood. The Children’s Bureau adopted the unified Baldwin-Wood tables through the 1910s. The Bureau would go on to use these tables in its publications and as promotion for its child health events. For the Bureau, charts provided a simple way of assessing health. If a child was two or more pounds below the average weight for his or her age or height, Bureau employees wrote, it “should be a warning that the child’s nutrition is not normal.”15

The charts simplified the complex subject of child health down to a series of numbers.

But this was not what height weight tables were originally meant to do. The first chart that might be called a height-weight table was designed by Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet in 1836.

13 Amanda M. Czerniawski, “From Average to Ideal: The Evolution of the Height and Weight Table in the United States, 1836-1943” Social Science History 31, no. 2 (2007): 273-296. 14 Robert Woodbury to Blanche Haines, 2 August 1922, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Anna Rude to Phillip K. Brown, 29 September 1921, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Theodore C. Merrill to Anna Rude, 11 August 1920, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Robert Woodbury to Emmett Holt, 29 June 1922, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor to Robert Woodbury, 19 November 1923, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Emmett Holt to Anna Rude, 26 April 1923, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Ella Oppenheimer to Ethel Thompson, 4 April 1931, Folder 4-5-11-0, Box 378, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 15 The Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing a Measuring Test: Part 3: Follow-Up Work. Bureau Publication No. 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), 4. 61

Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician, developed a Body Mass Index or Quetelet Index. His index, though, was not meant to assess individual health but rather to assess the weight of entire populations and to determine averages. It was a sociological tool, not a medical one.16

When the Children’s Bureau conflated height and weight ratios with health it masked some problems and created others. By the early 1920s, for example, statistician Louis Dublin wrote that immigrant children’s bodies did not conform to the same standards of Anglo children.

When public health workers measured Italian immigrant children to assess their health, he explained, they marked many of the children as healthy when they were in fact malnourished.

Along the same lines, other researchers concluded that while “undernourished children on the average weigh less than well-nourished children, the fact that an individual child weighs less or more than the average is not conclusive proof that he is undernourished or overnourished.”17

Critics even emerged from the Children’s Bureau itself, an agency whose public health identity was tightly linked with its dissemination of the charts. The Bureau promoted height-weight tables even though few of its employees believed the tables identified all the health issues that they were meant to identify.18 The charts were political tools as much as medical ones.

Bureau promotions not only popularized weighing, but also reinvented the practice as an unusually intimate advisory state activity. Weighing in and of itself did not require medical expertise. Anyone could weigh themselves or someone else with little education. Most could also be taught the basic graphic literacy required to read height-weight tables and figure out if the weight they calculated was too high, too low, or about right. With this number in hand, a mother

16 Georgio Bedogni, “Body Mass Index: From Quetelet to Evidence-Based Medicine,” in Body Mass Index: New Research, ed. Linda A. Ferrera (New York: Nova Science, 2005), 2. 17 Taliaferro Clark, Edgar Sydenstricker, Selwyn D. Collins, “Weight and Height as an Index of Nutrition,” Public Health Reports 38, no. 2 (January 12th 1923): 53. 18 Official Proceedings of the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, 28 November 1930, Washington, DC, The United States Daily V, no. 288, 7. Folder 6, Box 57, New York State College of Home Economics Records, 1875-1917, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, New York. 62 or teacher could pick up a nutrition book to fix the problem herself. Or she might go to a clinic or physician, especially if it was a young child who was not measuring up. The Bureau inserted these charts into nearly every infant and child care pamphlet it published. Tables were not meant to be flawless; they were meant to draw women in.

Child Health Conferences as Advisory Tools

In the early 1910s, women’s groups around the country had begun projects linking child weight, aesthetics, and health. Through “baby contests,” “baby health contests,” and other child health pageants these groups hoped to draw attention to the importance of baby health as a step toward improving infant mortality rates.19 These contests often took place at state and county fairs. Mothers brought in their babies (and sometimes older children), and judges evaluated and ranked the youth. Ultimately, they named and honored the healthiest child and his or her mother.

In Louisiana in 1908, the fair included a “Scientific Baby Contest.”20 In Iowa in 1911, the Iowa

Congress of Mothers put together a “Better Babies” contest for the state fair. The Iowa’s

Congress of Mothers added entertainment and prizes to their event, vastly increasing its appeal.

This chapter of the Congress of Mothers – taking a little inspiration from popular livestock contests already at state fairs – sought to make child pageants that had some actual reform programming built in.21 Children would be scored from zero to a hundred points according to score cards like the ones below.22

19 “American Baby Health Contest Association Suggestions for Organizing and Carrying on Baby Health Contests,” n.d. (between 1914-1920), Folder 4-14-2-3-0, Box 37, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 20 Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 1995, 93. 21 Annette K. Vance Dorey, Better Baby Contests: The Scientific Quest for Perfect Childhood Health in the Early Twentieth Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 6. 22 Examples of the adoption of standards include publications like Kansas State Board of Health Score Card and Iowa branch of the National Mothers Congress, which suggest the quick and thorough dissemination of the idea. See Folder 4-14-2-3-2, Box 37, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 63

The children were ranked, and those deemed healthiest won ribbons. The American

Medical Association’s public health section co-sponsored this first child health contest, lending an air of professional legitimacy to the event otherwise surrounded by prize pigs and pies.23 In some cases the contests included measures to more broadly improve child health. These included presentations and displays from public health nurses and club women. Even when the contests did not have a specific health improvement section, they still had pedagogical intentions.

Ranking infants and children required score cards. Score cards varied from event to event, but most employed similar conventions. Cards, like the one pictured below asked for the age, height

(or length, for infants), and weight of the child. This was non-negotiable. Other categories, ranging from plumpness to symmetry, might be included depending on the interests of the local groups running the contests.

Figure 4: The Section on Measurement from a baby contests score card of the American Medical Association. Folder 4-14-2-3-1, Box 37, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

23 American Medical Association, 1916 revised pamphlet, Folder 4-14-2-4-0, Box 37, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 64

Some of the first contests came out of eugenics movements. Francis Galton named the late-19th century interest in improving the so-called stock or quality of peoples “eugenics.”

Galton based his understanding of eugenics on his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural

Selection. Positive eugenics emphasized breeding the “fit” (white, Anglo, upper-class) with the

“fit,” with the aim of speeding up the process of Darwinian selection. On the other hand, negative eugenics focused on discouraging reproduction of the “unfit,” through measures like sterilization and marriage laws.24 A selection of Progressive activists translated the pseudo- science of eugenics into a social movement in the early 1900s.

In the tradition of positive eugenics, many of these reformers relied on educational measures mixed with strong social pressure. The eugenics movement was not unified in its methods. While some activists did not believe educational methods would ever truly weed out the “unfit,” instead pursuing legislation and force, others relied on these educational measures. It is critical to understand the differences between eugenic movements. Much of the eugenic activism of the early 20th century came through subtle methods. This does not mean they were any less racist or ethnocentric – their projects were those of remaking immigrant and non-white

Americans in an idealized white, native “American” fashion, in arenas as diverse as health, nutrition, parenting, and lifestyle. In practice, better baby contests lost their innocuous appearance. Most of the better baby contests were segregated, and in some instances contests for black babies awarded smaller prizes than white babies.25 Still, black middle class women’s concern about high rates of black infant mortality kept many engaged in the better baby contests,

24 Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995), 20- 22; Rebecca M. Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980 (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2011). 25 Indianapolis Baby Week, October 3-9, 1915, 12, Folder 4-14-2-2-4, Box 36, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 65 and took the public hygiene instructions of the contests back to their own communities.26 The

Children’s Bureau translated some of these subtler racial purification projects, begun by women’s clubs and local groups, into federal projects by the end of the decade.

The idea caught on. Following the Iowa fair, club women and public health workers in

Colorado, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington and New York developed their own competitions. In the years that followed they expanded still more, “sweeping the whole country” in the words of one reporter.27 Some groups offered cash prizes, others only ribbons, local media attention, and of course maternal bragging rights. More important from the point of view of the reformers involved, the contests also included instructions on “proper” baby feeding and nutrition, an assessment of the child for obvious signs of illness or malnutrition, and lessons in what the club women deemed proper hygiene. Discussions of what the contests accomplished slipped easily between eugenic and non-eugenic languages. The Illinois Medical Association justified the contests as a response to the “deterioration of the American stock.”28 In some areas, eugenics groups took charge of the contests, sometimes renaming them “Fitter Family” contests. The measures promoted even by the most committed eugenics groups were based in the power of assessing children and of changing maternal behaviors. While many eugenics groups focused on reproduction and the elimination of the “unfit” through genetic means, baby contests were centered around an “improvement” of the unfit. Especially as the decade went on, contest organizers embraced the language of “health” over the explicitly eugenic language of “stock.”

This is a critical distinction. Long after eugenics fell out of national favor after the Holocaust, the

26 Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007), 96, 98. 27 Vance Dorey, Better Baby Contests, 1999, 35. 28 Quoted in Vance Dorey, 27. 66 language of improved health allowed subtle projects around “fitness” to carry on with little controversy.

The Children’s Bureau and the voluntary groups organizing baby and child contests shared some goals, like that of improving physique. They also both needed to work within financial and power constraints. Neither could change laws, neither could monitor nor care for children themselves, and neither had the authority to force any parent to remake their behaviors in the desired image. They could not even force parents or children to show up to events, or pay any attention to their work. The Bureau could not even host its own events, given its limited resources and national audience. Despite these similarities, though, baby and child health contests frustrated the Children’s Bureau.29 This was especially the case with Bureau chief Julia

Lathrop. On one hand, she stated that these contests “should be a real stimulus to more intelligent care of all babies.”30 Any effort to pay attention to babies seemed like a step forward given the high child mortality rates. On the other hand, Lathrop was not impressed by the specific structure of the conferences. They were often disorganized, loud and dirty, and lacked standardization.31

Lathrop also did not approve of the prizes distributed at these contests. Commodifying child health with cash prizes seemed crass and unprofessional. It made the contests carnivalesque, and detracted from the serious health purposes Lathrop envisioned for the events. Even more to the point, an emphasis on rankings and prizes created an environment that encouraged the large attendance of mothers with already healthy children. Why would a mother bring her thin, sickly

29 Lathrop’s stance would be echoed in the stance Grace Abbott took when she replaced Lathrop in 1921. Grace Abbott to M V. O’Shea, 18 November 1921, Folder 4-11-0-5-1, Box 194, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland 30 Julia C. Lathrop to M. Russell Perkins, 13 February 1915; Julia C. Lathrop to Dr. Frederick R. Green, 18 September 1914; Woman's Home Companion Editor to Julia Lathrop, 26 June 1913; Agnes Ditson to Mary Watts, 25 November 1912, All: National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, Entry 3, Box 37, Folder 4-14-2-3-0. 31 Alexandra Minna Stern, “Making Better Babies: Public Health and Race Betterment in Indiana, 1920-1935,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (May 2002): 742-752. 67 child to the contest when she knew the child did not have a shot at the $100 pot? Instead, the

Bureau needed mothers of the thinnest, sickliest children to show up at child health events.32

Some medical professionals completely disavowed the contests, like the editor of the American

Journal of Diseases of Children who told Lathrop that “lining up these human infants as if they were pigs or calves is exceedingly repulsive.”33

Lathrop could not afford to dismiss the events entirely, though, and set out to introduce a reformed version of the contests. The middle-class Bureau attributed thin children to well- meaning but ignorant mothering. Ignorant mothering could presumably be fixed by introducing these women to scientific motherhood. The Bureau needed to create audiences of mothers interested in its child hygiene advice. The baby and child contest model had two things going for it that the Bureau needed. First, the contest model attracted publicity and excitement. More importantly, the contests were run by a decentralized set of (mainly) voluntary agencies across the country. These were urban as well as rural women’s clubs, public health groups, and teachers. They received some support from a variety of national organizations, including the

American Medical Association’s public health section, local and state government agencies, and the magazine Woman’s Home Companion. The contests had created an informal infrastructure around child health and aesthetics, a way of reaching millions of women across the nation and influencing their ideas on child hygiene without spending much money or expending other resources.

32 Max West to Roscoe C. Main, 18 August 1915, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, Entry 3, Box 37, Folder 4-14-2-3-0. 33 Frank Spooner Churchill to Julia Lathrop, 6 May 1914, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, Entry 3, Box 37, Folder 4-14-2-3-3. 68

Baby Week as Advisory Technique

In 1916, the Bureau tried to mobilize its informal network of female labor. These women, they imagined, would accept the Bureau’s child conferences as the scientific alterative to baby contests. To this end, the Bureau instituted a national “Baby Week.” The event consisted of nurses and volunteers examining hundreds if not thousands of babies in one busy week. The labor was dispersed. Local women examined local babies. The campaign included events in New

York City, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, as well as in small towns and cities across the country. The number of children weighed, measured, recorded, and assessed was more than anyone had set out to assess before. One New York City reporter insisted that “Baby Week has done to New

York’s attitude toward babies what a large, active firecracker placed under the chair of a dozing

Figure 5: Bureau publications (1915 and 1917) aimed at club women, essentially "how to" advice – the printed arm of the advisory state 69 grandfather might be expected to do.”34 Attaching the stamp of federal approval to these local events helped publicize them, and granted them political authority. The Baby Week did not include the prizes and awards which Lathrop had deemed crass, reducing the entertainment value of the events, but actually increasing their credibility as scientific events. Baby Week events were held in around 4700 communities.35

The Bureau’s Baby Week succeeded because of its combination of federal authority and quantification. Height-weight forms and measuring instructions offered an aura of scientific legitimacy to the project. They also made it simple for any lay woman to become an expert in child weight. While other height-weight materials and instruction existed at the time, the insistence that Baby Week was a project for the national good placed it in a different category.

Historians have studied the power of the federal government to compel – but not technically force – female citizens to comply with federal projects in roughly this period. By US entry into

World War I in 1917, there were programs to brutally repress and prosecute radicals, dissidents, and certain immigrants. There were also everyday projects of control and coercion that used voluntary methods to achieve their goals. These projects included campaigns encouraging women to do everything from monitoring their block for communists to buying war bonds. Not planting that victory garden might get a woman a sneer from her neighbor, but it would likely not get her a police visit. Compliance was all about the responsibilities of good citizenship – and a little dose of guilt. In the end, though, huge numbers of Americans “voluntarily” grimaced through meatless Mondays and sent their kids out to collect scrap metal. It was both a responsibility of citizenship and a point of pride. Baby Week carried a similar mandate.

34 Quoted in, Children’s Bureau, Baby-Week Campaigns: Suggestions for Communities of Various Sizes, Bureau Publication No. 15 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), 54. 35 Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood, 1997, 71. 70

Baby Week was a way of encouraging women’s voluntary groups around the country to put on child health conferences by suggesting one week would be set aside around the nation for such events. The Bureau further encouraged women’s groups by drumming up media attention for the events, and preparing more printed materials for groups that wanted them. During Baby

Week, women’s groups around the nation put on conferences using height-weight tables, and non-experts employed these advisory technologies to assess children’s height (or length), age, and weight. The intersection of these two measurements would mark the child as underweight, overweight, or acceptable in weight. These weight ratings could then be translated into health ratings: the child was read as healthy if it met the average and unhealthy if it fell short.36

The introduction of 1916 and 1917 Baby Weeks encouraged mothers to take these child health ratings to heart. Through brochures and pamphlets especially, mothers were to embrace the new scientific nutrition not for one week but every day. The Bureau’s printed materials reiterated the ideas of Baby Week, especially the idea that mothers did not innately know best.37

They needed to learn, and they needed to embrace the new science of child health. The health of the nation, they imagined, depended on it.

The Children’s Bureau’s 1914 Infant Care and 1915 Prenatal Care were designed specifically for mothers, social workers, and teachers. Infant Care would become one of the agency’s most popular publications. The booklet advised women on such topics as ventilating the nursery, registering their infant’s birth, and of course provided extensive details on weighing

36 In most cases, the “overweight” child was not understood as a problem until the 1950s. Individual children could certainly be deemed overweight, but there was not a systemic understanding of “overweight” equaling “unhealthy” in children at this point, since there was such a strong emphasis on children needing to gain weight in the shadow of malnutrition. The “overweight” equals “unhealthy” equation did apply to adults as early as the 1910s, but this was not a direct concern of the Children’s Bureau. 37 Alexandra Minna Stern, “Making Better Babies.” 71 and measuring infants. Various iterations of the popular booklet remained in print for decades.38

American mothers and women’s groups hungrily consumed the federal pamphlets. According to

Lathrop, the agency sent out over 100,000 copies of both Infant Care and Prenatal Care in their first year of publication. Most of the Bureau pamphlets were sent in response to individual letters directly requesting either a pamphlet or advice related to pamphlet topics.39 Most of the pamphlets and height-weight tables were available for free, or for just a few cents. Advice literature was exploding in popularity at the time, and women were open to experts.40 For women with minimal resources and a genuine concern about how to keep their children healthy, this might be the best advice available. Pamphlets were often given to women directly, like when leaving a Children’s Bureau approved baby conference (or even one of the more legitimately educational children’s health contests of the period). Other women heard about the pamphlets from friends, neighbors, or public health workers, and then wrote to the Bureau requesting copies.

Julia Lathrop asked Max West to prepare the original Infant Care pamphlet. Mrs. West

(her preferred title) was a married woman with five children, and presented herself as a

“maternal” voice in the first versions of Infant Care.41 She hoped to appeal to American women in a mother-to-mother fashion. Lathrop described West’s booklet as “addressed to the average mother of this country.”42 Its voice, according to one reviewer was “simple enough to be

38 Julia Lathrop and William B. Wilson, Letter of transmittal for Infant Care (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914), 7. 39 Julia Lathrop, Third Annual Report of the Chief, Children’s Bureau, to the Secretary of Labor (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1915), 11. 40 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (NY: Anchor, 1989); Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale, 1998); Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (NY: Vintage, 2003). 41 Welfare Administration, The Story of Infant Care, US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Children’s Bureau, 1965, 5. 42 Welfare Administration, The Story of Infant Care, 1965, 10. 72 understood by uneducated women and yet not so simple as to seem condescending to the educated.” The “maternal” voice was in part meant to comfort any mother reading, but that was not its only aim. The maternal voice also allowed the Bureau to claim it was not going beyond the bounds of what it was allowed to do. Although Lathrop was proud that the booklet was based on health literature and discussions with nurses and doctors, she also noted explicitly that with

Infant Care “there is no purpose to invade the field of the medical or nursing professions.”43 The booklet would by nature be advisory – all advice literature is. The Bureau added an extra caveat to its booklet, though, with the explicit insistence it was not a threat to other health organizations.

Although Infant Care remained a popular booklet through the late-1910s, the Bureau began to make changes to the publication in 1919. While just five years earlier the Children’s

Bureau had avoided stepping on the toes of the medical establishment by claiming distance from it, in 1919 the Bureau began trying to incorporate the medical establishment into its publications.

Lathrop invited representatives from the American Pediatric Society, and the Pediatric Society of the American Medical Association to review Bureau health materials. As the Advisory Medical

Committee to the Hygiene Division/Division of Research, the members added legitimacy to the

Bureau’s publications.44 Creating the Committee was also meant to reduce tensions between the

Bureau and medical organizations. The Bureau thus used revisions to Infant Care to manage its critics while continuing to provide respected advisory state materials.

Just after bringing the Committee on board, the Bureau set out to make further changes to increase the publication’s advisory appeal. The Children’s Bureau removed Mrs. Max West’s name from Infant Care, explaining it would be more authoritative without a specific author.

43 Welfare Administration, The Story of Infant Care, 1965, 11. 44 Welfare Administration, The Story of Infant Care, 1965, 19. 73

Without an author the publication would have an omniscient, more scientific feel to it. It would also have the authority of coming from the federal government. “It is impossible,” a letter explaining the change to Max West explained, “to get either State or City Board of Health to recommend a publication with an individual name. They want a government publication.” Both private organizations and physicians would be more apt to recommend a government-authored publication than one with an individual name attached to it, the Bureau chair reasoned.45 With its scientific makeover, Infant Care became one of the Bureau’s most influential works. The plication of the revisions was that Infant Care now looked like advice with the backing (and consensus) of the full federal government. This was not just maternal advice, but expert advice, and American mothers needed to heed it. Through such moves, the Bureau actively crafted its advisory state position.

Baby Week was an ideal venue for disseminating publications like Infant Care. Baby contest score cards had begun the process of arming non-experts with tools of “scientific” assessment. Mothers, teachers, and nurses (in practice experts, but grouped with non-experts since their skills were rarely taken seriously) could read a scale or ruler and fill in the blanks on a score card. The charts allowed supposed non-experts to authoritatively do the work of experts in a simple, standardized, fashion. Lathrop thought that this quantification – the use of child contest methods alongside the more scientific-seeming Bureau advice a la Infant Care – was an efficient way of reaching as many mothers and teachers as possible.46

Even though Baby Week was an advisory state project, its success in mobilizing scores of women to measure and assess their children meant that some male politicians claimed the

45 Welfare Administration, The Story of Infant Care, 1965, 20. 46 Others followed her lead, as with the Red Cross nurses’ queries into which specific brand of scale the Children’s Bureau recommended. Red Cross Department of Nursing to Julia Lathrop, 9 June 1920; Julia Lathrop to Red Cross Department of Nursing, 15 June 1920; Folder 4-14-2-4-0, Box 37, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 74 projects to be federal overreach. Lathrop and the Bureau were forced to defend the 1916 Baby

Week project at the next year’s agency appropriation hearings. Jacob H. Gallinger, a Republican

Senator from New Hampshire, fought against the Bureau’s funding request based on projects like

Baby Week.47 “It occurs to me,” Gallinger said, “that this bureau are (sic) engaged in some activities that they may well lay aside. For instance, one of their great activities was to establish a

“national baby week.” The Senator opposed an increase in the Bureau’s funding, suggesting the

Bureau was overstepping. “They are sending out [Baby Week] publications and doubtless are sending thousands and thousands of letters; trying to arouse people to the necessity of having a baby week not only in the cities – I believe a few cities have succumbed to their appeals – but a national baby week.”48 Gallinger’s statement was brimming with his annoyance. Defenders of

Baby Week argued instead that the Bureau was too weak. Representative Henry F. Hollis (D –

New Hampshire) framed his support entirely through descriptions of the agency as toothless. The subject of child hygiene, Hollis explained, is “one that does appeal in all its aspects to men.”49

Hollis argued that since “we do consider it a woman’s work to know about children and children’s diseases,” it would be best to support the Bureau’s projects. 50 Hollis framed the

Bureau as non-threatening and submissive. It is because the Children’s Bureau wants a more sympathetic treatment of children, he explained, “that they come here and ask us to allow them to continue the baby work and to continue it in their way.” He followed the image of this powerless, begging agency with a reminder that all the agency would do is investigate, and that the topic they would investigate “is one that men do neglect.”51

47 Congress, Senate, 64th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (19 Jan. 1917), p. 1678. 48 Congress, Senate, 64th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (19 Jan. 1917), p. 1678. 49 Congress, Senate, 64th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (19 Jan. 1917), p. 1678-1679. 50 Congress, Senate, 64th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (19 Jan. 1917), p. 1678-1679. 51 Congress, Senate, 64th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (19 Jan. 1917), p. 1678-1679. 75

The 1919 Children’s Year

While the use of women’s voluntary labor was critical to Baby Week’s success, Julia

Lathrop still struggled with putting her child health agenda in the hands of everyday women.

Lathrop wrote about how “even many of the best educated fathers and mothers…have never read a statistical table, and never will.”52 Getting these parents to take statistical tables home and integrate them into their regular child health routine was critical to the maintenance of a height- weight program. Lathrop also wrote that while she filled the Baby Week pamphlets with “facts about the dangers which beset American babies,” she knew that parents would “successfully evade” them. Great success required a larger campaign, Lathrop knew, and that campaign would also need more active advising by the Bureau.

It was with the growing sense that Baby Week was not enough instruction that women of the Bureau encountered the end of World War I. In the wake of the Great War, Children’s

Bureau agents watched the creation of new war-orphan laws in France, and the federally- orchestrated improvement of infant mortality in post-war Britain. Something was wrong when these war-devastated nations could make improvements to child health that the United States could not. Great Britain was in economic shambles, yet still was improving teacher training and youth physical training. British government funding was being funneled into the creation of children’s play facilities.53 What did it say about America, they wondered, that no equivalent projects were underway in a nation with a mere fraction of Britain’s war damage and lost resources?

In response to this perceived lack of support for American children, Julia Lathrop declared that 1919 would be the “Children’s Year.” This would be a year-long campaign for

52 Quoted in Congress, Senate, 64th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (19 Jan. 1917), p. 1678. 53 Children’s Bureau, Save 100,000 Babies: Get a Square Deal for Children, Children’s Year Leaflet 1, Bureau Publication 36 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 2. 76 child health awareness and promotion. To create such a large and sustained campaign, the

Bureau enlisted the voluntary labor of swaths of Americans in order to promote child welfare and hygiene. The Bureau’s Children’s Year campaign explicitly targeted “not only mothers and fathers, teachers, physicians, infant-welfare nurses, and other social workers who have to do with children, but men and women experienced in organization, and young people with leisure and good will.”54 All could be used in improving child health. Lathrop explained that the goal of the

Children’s Year was to save the lives of 100,000 children under the age of five, children who would otherwise die of preventable causes. All said, an impressive list of local-level public health and hygiene measures came out of the Bureau’s 1919 Children’s Year. Subpar results in

California sparked action that created seventeen permanent county health centers and positions for dozens of public health nurses and dental hygienists. More importantly, the state established a division of child hygiene with a $20,000 budget under the state’s department of health.55 The

Bureau argued that there was a similar outcome in every state. In any case, following the children’s year twenty-one states created children hygiene divisions (nine states had already had such divisions). The Bureau’s voluntary, minimally funded, and decentralized program had more or less succeeded. Where the Bureau had no power to build clinics or install teams of dental hygienists it still managed to accomplish some of its goals during the Children’s Year.

54 Children’s Bureau, Save 100,000 Babies, 1918, 4. 55 Children’s Bureau, Children’s Year: A Brief Summary of Work Done and Suggestions for Follow-Up Work, Bureau Publication No. 67 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), 9. 77

Figure 6: The Children's Year, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-9867

The Bureau framed the 1919 project from the start as a project that would rely on voluntary agencies and women’s co-operation. The Bureau had no financial or resources to offer to local events, but promised local communities that the events would be inexpensive to run and worthwhile for local communities. Free instruction from the Bureau would be implemented through generous workers and “untrained volunteers.”

The Children’s Year was a more ambitious campaign than either the 1916 or 1917 Baby

Week, and over the course of the year it won greater participation, enthusiasm, and support than had received. The first major event was a “nationwide Weighing and Measuring Test of young children.” According to the Bureau’s publications, the support would come from a number of sources. In larger cities the Bureau would lean on city officials, city health departments and the child hygiene or child welfare divisions some of these departments had, women’s organizations, 78 school boards and teaching staff, and churches. They went so far as to optimistically anticipate that the mayors of some municipalities would get involved. Civic organizations were also enlisted. From infant welfare societies to remaining settlement houses to the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts, charities could be of great use. While the actual workers involved with rounding up and measuring children were expected to be female, the Bureau believed that men’s organizations might get involved with promotions and financial backing. The Bureau asked fraternal orders, labor unions, and the chamber of commerce all to stand behind the weighing campaign. Many provided publicity and financial support. Once the support for Children’s Year was established in each locality, the Bureau also provided instruction on how the groups should organize themselves. The Bureau suggested local conferences be divided into publicity, finance, and enrollment committees. Another committee would focus exclusively on procuring the scientific equipment needed for measuring.56 The Bureau managed the Children’s Year with a vision of truly shaping each event according to Bureau expectations.

As part of the Children’s Year, the Bureau became an even more enthusiastic proponent of child measurement and standards. The mostly female volunteers at the events were instructed to draw heavily upon the Bureau’s Baby Week and Child Health Conference pamphlets for guidance. The Bureau issued pages of special instructions for the Children’s Year weighing program. Children were to be weighed and measured with very specific equipment. The Bureau promised that “the equipment essential for the test is simple.” This included a standard scale, a platform scale, a measuring rod, a good supply of tape measures, a 45” long table covered in quilts, oilcloths, cotton sheets and paper towels, and a few other supplies.57

56 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing and Measuring Test: Part 1: Suggestions to Local Committees, Bureau Publication No. 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), 3. 57 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing and Measuring Test: Part 1, 1918, 7. 79

The instructions for actually performing the weighing and measuring were even more complicated. They required their own separate Children’s Bureau pamphlet: Wash your hands.

Undress children and wrap them in a thin towel. Take off their shoes. Hold a book or small box horizontally on top of the child’s head when measuring his or her height (assuming a more scientific scale was unavailable). Lay babies down, completely relaxed with no bent joints, and measure their length with enamel bookends. There was even a science to filling in measuring cards. Examiners needed to use fractions rather than decimals, and round ages to the nearest birthday.58 The committee of women used would ideally include local physicians or nurses who gave of their time freely. Only a physician was allowed, for instance, to mark a child as “healthy and free from serious defect,” or to provide recommendations to mothers in writing.59 Most of the examiners, instead, would be middle class women active in the community. These women, the Bureau explained, ought to “rehearse the procedure of weighing and measuring” before being released on the babies.60

58 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing and Measuring Test: Part 2: Suggestions to Examiners, Bureau Publication No. 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918, 2-3. 59 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing and Measuring Test: Part 2, 1918, 4. 60 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing and Measuring Test: Part 1, 1918, 8. 80

Figure 7: "Suggested Form for Permanent Record," 1919 Children's Year, from "April and May Weighing and Measuring Test: Part 3, Follow-Up Work," Children's Year Leaflet no. 2, part 3, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), p. 8.

After the actual weighing, the woman measurers had extensive instruction on how to record the data. The height-weight tables available represented a large number of average children, Bureau pamphlets explained. Despite apprehensions, local women conducting measuring were told to treat them as scientific fact. When actual children deviated from the average child measurements of the tables by just two pounds they were marked. When the women found these divergences from the norm, even the mere two pound divergences, they were to advise parents to bring the abnormal child to a physician. In the Bureau’s plans for events of meticulous measurement and careful assessment, the Bureau reiterated the importance of expertise. On one hand, giving laywomen weight tables and putting them in the position to take charge of child health – both that of their own children and that of the community at large – 81 empowered these women. On the other hand, the growing insistence on experts undermined that empowerment. As the Bureau further sold the importance of expert-validated quantitative child health, mothers increasingly accepted the Bureau message: it was their responsibility to assess and measure their child, and that was something the Bureau could help them with. It was also now their responsibility to take the child for a true “expert” measurement and assessment, though. This was not something the advisory Bureau could do for them.

The acceptance of the first part, the idea women needed to take charge of their child’s health through scientific means, can be seen through their participation in the Children’s Year measuring test. As part of the Bureau’s promotion of the mass quantification event, the Bureau

Figure 8: Children' Bureau approved measuring board, for the scientific measurement of baby and toddler height/length. Library of Congress, n.d., LC-DIG-hec-14486 prepared a short pro-measurement film called “Our Children.” The film was produced as part of the Children’s Year, but the Children’s Bureau hoped it would have impact beyond the one year affair. “Our Children” began with the idea that children needed to be weighed as a response to high American child mortality rates. Club women in the film were spurred to action simply by reading a newspaper article in which the Children’s Bureau called for women to weigh their children. Clearly the Bureau believed itself so influential that their mere call to pay attention to a problem would lead to voluntary support. In the film, though, simply weighing children was not enough. Weighing needed to be careful, to be “scientific.” 82

Without a home scale, the women in the film first tried to weigh a baby by sticking him on the scale attached to the back of a passing ice truck. The infant was not interested in this, however. He cried and screamed, and wriggled so much that the women were unable to get an accurate weight reading. The women then took the child to the grocery store for a produce-scale weighing. The results were not much better. Older children kept falling off the grocery scale.61

This was no scientific motherhood. Finally, a group of club women decided to invite experts from the Bureau itself to come assess local children. As might be expected in this propaganda for health quantification, only this expert guidance allows the women to successfully weigh their children. The pictured Bureau and their nurses were adept at handling children, even more than their mothers seemed to be. They came equipped with scales designed especially for babies and children, meant to produce meaningful numbers. Only a numerical assessment of the child could provide the modern measure of health that the Bureau valued. In time, these would become the measures that most women valued.

All of this weighing was explicitly intended to measure and improve the health of children around the nation. It also served another purpose. The conferences would allow the

Bureau to create its own dataset on American child health (i.e. height-weight). The Bureau figured that collecting the weights and measurements of about 200,000 children would allow them to create new height-weight charts that would assess a larger number of children, and a more ethnically and regionally diverse set of children. One of the Bureau’s major complaints

61 Interestingly, when asked directly by Red Cross nurses, Julia Lathrop believed that a grocer’s scale was fine for weighing infants (although she did not believe it was adequate for weighing older children). The inclusion of the grocer as another stop on the tour of un-scientific motherhood in the film, though, emphasizes the Bureau’s belied in the importance of expertise and the need for professional intervention into mothers’ habits. . Red Cross Department of Nursing to Julia Lathrop, 9 June 1920; Julia Lathrop to Red Cross Department of Nursing, 15 June 1920; Folder 4-14-2-4-0, Box 37, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 83 with baby contests had been the lack of consistent, accurate standards for assessing children.62

With this new 1919 dataset, the Bureau would have standardized numbers for future events.63 To prepare this dataset, local conference organizers were asked to write in to the Children’s Bureau for official child scoring cards before holding a conference. The measurement cards used in any weighing situation were meant to be torn in half. One half of the card would be given to mothers to remind them of where their child fit into the average, and where he or she ought to fit. If a child was underweight for his or her height, the local women who put on the event were also advised to keep a “permanent record” of that child’s measurement for themselves.64 Mothers also were given a more detailed physician’s assessment of their child. The other half of the simple measuring card was to be mailed to the Bureau for its own records.65 Using the half-cards,

Bureau statisticians developed a set of height-weight charts divided by race (black and white only) and gender.

While the Bureau was confident that the data collection was necessary, some local organizers were not as convinced. Having fully imbibed the Bureau’s message of quantitative expertise, some local women did not imagine the data collected in their own communities was physician-level scientific. The same women who had sat through Bureau films on scientific weighing and read through the taxing measurement instructions issued by the Bureau were

62 Mary D. to Brown Sherbon, 9 February 1920, Folder 4-4-9, Box 28, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Anna Rude to Ruth Dodd, 5 November 1920, Folder 4-4-9, Box 28, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Mrs. C. P. Sembach to Children’s Bureau, 4 June 1920, Folder 4-4-9, Box 28, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Frances E. Thorp to Children’s Bureau, 9 April 1920, Folder 4-4-9, Box 28, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland 63 And a standard set for the regular questions the Bureau received about child weight. Gladys Stockman to Children’s Bureau, 22 June 1923, Folder 4-5-4-1, Box 28, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Robert Woodbury to Charles S. Prest, 9 April 1924, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Charles S. Prest to Robert Woodbury, 15 April 1924, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 197, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 64 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing a Measuring Test: Part 3, 1918, 3. 65 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing a Measuring Test: Part 1, 1918, 6. 84 worried the individual measurements taken at their events would not meet the Bureau’s standards. A doctor who supervised weighing events in Illinois wrote to the Bureau’s chief of hygiene: “Let me beg of you, as one interested in the problem, not to use your 200,000 children's year cards.” She continued, explaining that “those weights were taken by people unskilled in weighing; they were often done hurriedly; and I have prayed form the beginning that you would base no figures on those returns.”66 The Bureau’s chief of hygiene responded with a promise that scientific measurement would prevail. She explained that anything especially abnormal had been removed from the dataset. Also, the results of the 200,000 supervised weighings would be checked against a set of 6000 expert weighings. Also, she explained, “statistically, large numbers have the value of tending to correct errors.”67 The doctor and the chief spoke a similar language of expertise. Both placed great value on what weight could tell them about health. Both also imbued the numbers themselves with power: the power to correct themselves, the power to smooth out non-experts’ errors.

The newly-created Bureau height-weight measurements replaced most of their predecessors, becoming the gold standard of child measuring, which in turn was the gold standard of child health. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Americans moved most child health concerns from the community to the physician’s office. The Bureau could not stop this, nor did it want to.68 It kept a toe-hold in child health, though, by setting the terms – down to the data and tables – on which experts would discuss child health in the immediate future.

66 Caroline Hedger to Anna Rude, 2 December 1919; Woman's Home Companion Editor to Julia Lathrop, 26 June 1913, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, Entry 3, Box 28, Folder 4-4-9. 67 Anna Rude to Caroline Hedge, 9 December 1919, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, Entry 3, Box 28, Folder 4-4-9. 68 Instead, the Bureau increasingly recommended that women take their children to doctors for proper weighing. Viola Russell to F.J. Reynolds, 2 March 1927, Folder 4-11-4-5, Box 277, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Frances C. Robert to Mrs. Ed Redford, 21 September 1931, Folder 4-5-12-6, Box 378, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives 85

Figure 9: Height-weight chart for white boys, developed from Children's Year of 1919 data

Conclusion

After the 1919 Children’s Year, the Bureau encouraged the local women responsible for the weighing and measuring to pursue other child health measures. Once events like the

Children’s Year had brought women into the world of public health work and scientific mothering, the Bureau advised localities to keep women in that world through continuous events.

The Bureau recommended that its pamphlets on topics like prenatal care and milk supply be spread around communities. The Bureau also suggested local women’s clubs hold lectures and meetings on the care and feeding of children. Local groups might also introduce the next

II, College Park, Maryland; Frances C. Robert to Mrs. Charles Zien, 28 August 1929, Folder 4-6-3-1, Box 380, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 86 generation of mothers to weight and health standards through Little Mothers’ Leagues or in school programming. Above all other measures, the club women who had participated in Baby

Weeks and Children’s Year were encouraged to fundraise and campaign to get at least one public-health nurse in their community. The nurse must focus on prenatal and young children’s health concerns, and could be supported through either private fundraising or through convincing the local government to allocate funds.69 In any case, the Bureau made clear that women were not to lose interest in the project of scientific mothering and health. Children needed to be weighed, the Bureau told them, and they needed to be weighed in a very specific manner. The continuation of that work, though, was up to local women.

The Children’s Bureau employed a variety of advisory state techniques in the 1910s and early 1920s. The primary strategy of the agency was a reliance on voluntary networks, especially those run by women sympathetic to the Bureau’s cause, and accustomed to being called upon to do the “family labor” of government. Middle class club women read child conference brochures, organized baby weeks in 1916 and 1917, and rose to the challenge of running a series of

Children’s Year events. Through quantification and standardization, through little score cards and straight-forward scales, these women likely internalized the values of scientific motherhood.

In the process of accepting these values, they accepted that a careful measurement of height and weight could be a stand in for child health. Height and weight measurements that fell within the normal range were evidence that a mother was living up to the expectations of scientific motherhood. If a child was above or below the normal range, perhaps there was something wrong with that child. More to the point, perhaps there was something wrong with that mother.

69 Children’s Bureau, April and May Weighing a Measuring Test: Part 3, 1918, 4-5. 87

At that point, it might become a public issue. It might also become a professional medical issue, an issue for the growing field of pediatrics.70

Projects like the 1919 Children’s Year helped the Bureau gain support for its child health/child weight efforts. Soon after the Bureau published the results of its Children’s Year, the

1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act passed Congress. With it, communities found help getting the public health nurse the Bureau told them to get, running the health lectures they had been asked to run, and making child weighing and measuring and regular affair. While the Sheppard-Towner Act suggested a new direction in child health matters, and a more involved and directive Children’s Bureau, the program might be better understood as an anomaly in the primarily advisory work of the Bureau. Through pamphlets, quantification, and above all through the use of women’s voluntary labor, the advisory Children’s Bureau of the

1910s made the more-directive Bureau of the 1920s possible.

At the same moment the Children’s Bureau was popularizing height-weight charts as a way of accessing information about children’s health, they were also putting the charts in the hands of mothers and teachers. As women learned to use child height-weight charts, they were also being told that there was a relationship between their own weight and health. As I turn to adult women of the 1920s and 1930s in the next chapter, I also show that the rise of a new dieting culture reinforced this idea. While advisory programming and popular culture trained women to focus on weight as a way of managing health, another federal agency came to believe that using weight as shorthand for health was inadequate, if not dangerous. The Bureau of Home

Economics, direct descendants of Wilbur Atwater and Caroline Hunt, also believed in using simplified terms and advisory state technique to reach American women. The home economists,

70 The medical specialty, alongside the idea that children’s health needs were substantially different than adult health needs, was new but rapidly growing. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) would not be founded until 1929 – interestingly the same year that the Sheppard-Towner Act would be defunded. 88 however, believed calories and vitamins rather than weight was the way to accomplish this. The internal was more important than the external, they argued. Home economists would find it more difficult than they expected, though, to convince women that vitamins rather than pounds should define how women managed their and their families’ bodies. 89

Chapter 3

Fatter, Thinner, or As Is: Diet Advice from the Bureau of Home Economics, 1923-1933

In 1948, the Department of Agriculture threw a twenty-fifth anniversary party for one of its bureaus, the federal Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics. At the gala, Bureau

Chief Hazel Stiebeling toasted to the office’s history. “The fact that the Bureau of Human

Nutrition and Home Economics exists,” Stiebeling said, “is due in no small measure to the … women of the country.” She explained that the Bureau “was established because [women] kept asking the Department of Agriculture and the State Colleges for information which could come only from research.” When the Bureau of Home Economics took up those research projects, it became “the only federal agency given full time to research on problems of direct concern to women as homemakers.”1 Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan agreed. He said that he didn’t think, that of all the Department of Agriculture agencies, “there is any one that’s closer to the people that we serve than you folks in this Bureau.”2

Federal home economists, both implied, had responsibilities beyond those of other federal agencies. They would do research, including nutrition research like their predecessors in the Office of Experiment Stations. This was only half of their job, though. As a female-led agency, the Bureau needed to make sure this research was relevant and accessible to American homemakers.3 The Bureau of Home Economics’ attempt to balance these competing mandates

1 Dr. Stiebeling’s speech; first draft; 2 June 1948: Research in the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Agricultural Library, RG 176: Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Folder: 25th Anniversary of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, 1923-1948. 2 Charles F. Brannan, untitled speech, 2 June 1948, National Agricultural Library archives, RG 176: Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Folder: 25th Anniversary of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, 1923-1948. 3 Caroline Hunt to Charles Langworthy, 28 February 1923, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 519, Folder: Memos. 90 illuminates the collaboration between the advisory state agency and its audience on the issue of adult weight. While democratic government always requires the consent of the governed, advisory state work requires not just consent but also the participation of its audience.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the field of home economics became a center for female scientists.

Home economics is the field of the scientific management of the household, encompassing household production and consumption.4 In the Progressive Era of efficiency, rationality, and expertise, home economics developed as a professional approach to cooking, cleaning, child rearing, nutrition, and a number of other jobs typically seen as the women’s work of the home.

While some American women fought for political rights in the era, home economist Ellen

Richards explained that she “did not scorn womanly duties” as she believed suffragists did.5

Instead, Richards proposed that well-educated women find ways to use science rather than the ballot to improve women’s lives. In particular, she championed scientific nutrition, also called

“dietetics.” Some have argued that Richards genuinely believed that home economics was the ideal place for women, and others have suggested that she “used domesticity as camouflage.”6 In either case, Richards helped spearhead a movement of female expertise and the project of a special woman-centered science.

The Home Economics movement grew quickly, and was institutionalized quickly.7 Led by Richards, it grew from a series of conferences in Lake Placid, New York (held annually from

4 Carolyn Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth Century America (Greensboro: University of North Carolina, 2012), 2. 5 Although Richards opposed women’s suffrage, a minority of women in the home economics movement, including Caroline Hunt who is discussed later, supported it. Marelene Rayner-Canham and Geoffrey Rayner- Canham, Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1998), 52-53; Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 35-40. 6 Julie Des Jardins, The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (New York: Feminist Press, 2010), 18-19. 7 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), 65. 91

1899-1907), into a formal organization called the American Home Economics Association in

1908.8 Members came from a variety of backgrounds, but chemists, especially those concerned with human nutrition, had a strong presence. Wilbur Olin Atwater was a supporter of and ally to women conducting nutrition work as home economists. He directly worked with a number of these young scientists on late-19th century food surveys, and thus imbued younger home economists like Caroline Hunt and his daughter Helen Atwater with a legacy of greater scientific authority. In an attempt to use the emerging field of home economics to scientifically organize farm life, the Department of Agriculture opened an Office of Home Economics in 1915, and recruited the emerging generation of home economics graduates.9 Then, in 1923, the Department sanctioned a larger and more permanent Bureau of Home Economics. By the end of the 1930s,

250 women and 20 men worked in the Bureau of Home Economics, making the Department of

Agriculture the largest employer of female physical scientists in the federal government.10

Nutritionist scientists working in the Bureau would spend the 1920s and 1930s balancing their responsibilities as scientists with their responsibility to a female public. The nutrition work of the Bureau, like the rest of the work of the Bureau, needed to be practical and accessible to a large audience of American women if the Bureau was to actually be as “close to the people” as its celebrators envisioned it. The Bureau would disseminate scientific research with household applications, meant to make American women’s lives more efficient, organized, and rationally-

8 Goldstein, Creating Consumers, 2012, 1-2. 9 Charles Langworthy to Flora Rose, 29 March 1918, Folder 14, Box 11, New York State College of Home Economics Records, 1875-1917, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, New York; Home economics syllabus, 210, Woman and the State, Folder 40, Box 17, New York State College of Home Economics Records, 1875-1917, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, New York 10 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 1982, 224, 226. 92 planned.11 As historian Carolyn Goldstein has explained, home economists would be “guides to a complex modern world.”12

Figure 1: The second Bureau of Home Economics chief (1944-1963), Hazel Stiebeling, engaging with the public, as the position required. More specifically, she is speaking with Science, Technology and Society finalists in 1949. Photo from Science and Society.

The women of the Bureau of Home Economics, though, had not come to the agency by way of applied research. Instead, the women of the Bureau came from science backgrounds, with degrees in chemistry and physics. Largely shut out of the male world of laboratory science, within the field of Home Economics these women could research and experiment as federal scientists under the guise of doing practical, applicable work. Bureau women like Hazel

Stiebeling and her predecessor Louise Stanley believed in scientific motherhood and scientific

11 Work of the Office of Home Economics, report, September 15th, 1922, National Archives II, College Par, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 519, Folder: Report 12 Goldstein, Creating Consumers, 2012, 5. 93 nutrition, but also worried about just how applicable their work should be. They did not want the nutrition science behind their diet advice to be lost in the translation.

While the Children’s Bureau spent the 1920s convincing mothers to weigh and measure their children, the Bureau of Home Economics spent those years trying to convince American women to focus on food and improve children from the inside-out. The Bureau of Home

Economics served a largely advisory role in these years. The agency put out pamphlets and meal plans.13 It did not try to push the boundaries by offering events and services the way the

Figure 2: Figure from Home Economics university course pamphlet. The caption reads: "An understanding of the sciences should underlie all home economics study." Education in Home Economics, (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, 1917), vol. 16, no. 8, p. 11

13 Memo from Ruth Van Deman to Louise Stanely, 28 March 1924, Box 601, Entry 5, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Memo from Caroline Hunt to Louise Stanley, 26 March 1924, Box 601, Entry 5, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Caroline Hunt to Louise Stanley, 1 April 1926, Folder Hunt, Caroline, Box 599, Entry 5, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 94

Children’s Bureau had. Home Economics already existed in schools, colleges, and extension work around the country that could provide such services if needed. The Bureau of Home

Economics was fine leaving directive extension work to the extension workers. Bureau workers would instead research, and spread that material through accessibly-written pamphlets. That research and pamphlet writing practice was an advisory state technology. It was the work of a female-run agency reaching out to a primarily-female audience and asking that audience to accept what the Bureau advised.

The Bureau of Home Economics’ relationship with its audience illuminates the sometimes complicated relationship between advisory state agencies and their advisees. While chemists in the Bureau of Home Economists told American women about nutrients, minerals, and vitamins, women wrote to the Bureau and requested information on their own concerns. For instance, women regularly asked the Bureau to address issues of fatness and thinness, and of the weight of both children and adult women. Advisory work, the Bureau discovered, required some level of consent. Otherwise, the efforts of an advisory agency could simply be ignored. The

Bureau had legitimacy among the women it wanted to reach on the basis of the women’s prestigious federal employment and their scientific pedigrees. These images of women – Bureau women as serious scientists and the Bureau women as chummy, approachable female figures – clashed. Faced with pressure from pamphlet readers and popular culture, the Bureau of Home

Economics gradually adapted its literature on nutrition and diet to address weight and reducing.

95

The Women’s Work of Science

In 1923, the Bureau of Home Economics formally replaced the Department of

Agriculture’s Office of Home Economics.14 Dr. Charles Langworthy, who had headed the original office, requested that a female home economist take over the new Bureau. Langworthy believed that a woman at the helm might make the Bureau more approachable and its advice more practical. Dr. Louise Stanley was selected. With degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia, a PhD from Yale, and expertise in both science and education, the highly educated Stanley had not been able to get a laboratory job in the male field of chemistry. Instead,

Stanley began work teaching home economics, and soon became chair the new Department of

Home Economics at the University of Missouri.15 Stanley helped develop the Bureau of Home

Economics in 1923, and then became the first woman to head an agency within the Department of Agriculture when she took over. Her position at the fore of the feminized research agency also made her the highest paid female scientist in the federal government during her twenty years as

Chief of the Bureau.16

14 The Bureau of Home Economics: Origins and History, Folder 18, Box 11, New York State College of Home Economics Records, 1875-1979, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, New York. 15 Goldstein, Creating Consumers, 2012 16 Gladys L. Baker, “Women in the US Department of Agriculture,” Agricultural History 50, no. 1 (January 1976): 197-198. 96

Figure 3: Dr. Louise Stanley at work, taken the year she became Chief of the new Bureau of Home Economics, 1923. Library of Congress print: LC-DIG-npcc-24560

The new Bureau of Home Economics was divided into three areas: food and nutrition, textiles, and economics. The centrality of the nutrition section of the agenda to the young Bureau was clear from the beginning. Chief Stanley herself initially served both as chief of the Bureau and as chief of the food and nutrition division. The Bureau divided its new resources among four nutrition projects: food composition studies, vitamin studies, dietary studies/standards, and cooking experiments.17 The Office of Home Economics had played a critical role in translating federal research on calories and food values into consumable knowledge. The Bureau of Home

17 Paul Vernon Betters, The Bureau of Home Economics: Its History, Activities and Organization, Service Monographs of the United States Government, No. 62 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1930), 44. 97

Economics would continue this mission of both researching and translating the complex science of nutrition, now on a much larger scale.

From the start the Bureau sought out only the most highly educated women for its posts.

The better-paid positions almost all required graduate degrees in the 1920s. Even laboratory assistants charged with feeding the guinea pigs were expected to have Bachelor’s degrees.18 This hiring arrangement was possible, as even elite white women with advanced degrees in chemistry and economists were refused work directly in their chosen fields. Instead, these women were to put their “special skills” and “sensibilities” toward a specifically female science.19 Some historians have argued that turning their elite chemistry and biology degrees into home economics represented the miserable “women’s work of science,” but more recent considerations of the subject have argued that many home economists were not sidelined, but actually happy to apply their research skills to the practical problems of home economics.20 I find the evidence points at home economists’ frustration with their lot, at least in the case of Bureau nutritionists.

The work of home economics, as a feminized field, was less prestigious, less funded, and less powerful than other sciences.21 While Stanley’s $5000 salary was a tidy sum for a woman in government, male scientists in government had salaries of $6000-$8000 without heading an agency. In the private-sector science jobs not available to most women, these men could easily make three times Stanley’s salary.22

18 Various job announcements, especially: “Junior Home Economics Specialist,” 13 Sept. 1926, and “Home Economics Writer,” 17 July 1926. National Archives II, College Park, MD, RG 176: Bureau of Home Economics, Entry 3, Box 564 - Folder C.S.C. Examination Announcements - 1922-1931. 19 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 1982, 51. 20 Megan J. Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008), 63. 21 Jordynn Jack, Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II (Urbana-Chapaign: Illinois, 2009), 101. 22 “The Dues of the American Association and the Salaries of Scientific Men,” Science 51, no. 1309 (January 1920): 115. 98

With so many other doors closed, home economists in the Bureau defensively policed their status as scientific professionals. The job of nutritionists working for the Bureau involved extensive literature reviews. Women in the nutrition section, for example, revised and challenged

Wilbur Atwater’s work on calories and macronutrients. They also used the Bureau laboratories to test how food storage affected nutrition. Drawing on Atwater and early home economists’ food composition tables, Bureau scientists canned, froze, and cooked foods to assess changes in nutrition values.23 Polish scientist Casimir Funk first discovered vitamins in 1912.24 Nutrition scientists in the 1910s and early 1920s occupied themselves with better understanding these

“curious nutritional substances.”25 In these years, scientists named vitamins A, B, C, D and E, and began work creating artificial versions of the vitamins in their labs.

Vitamin studies were a central research concern in the Bureau’s first decades. Bureau food chemists conducted experiments designed to better understand how different vitamins affected the body. Most of these experiments involved feeding or depriving rats or guinea pigs of one vitamin, or, conversely, providing the rodents with an abundance of the vitamin. The big question of applied nutrition science was: “in what proportions must…nutritive ingredients be fed in order to produce from a minimum of food the maximum of flesh (lead), or fat, or both?”26

Home economists fed rats and measured them against control rats.27 They might use as many as

23 Rowena Schmidt Carpenter to Louise Stanley, 19 September 1930, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 532, Folder: BHE**C 24 The “discovery” of vitamins may be an overstatement. Specific compounds had been recognized several decades earlier; what Casimir Funk did was come to understand the general concept of vitamins. 25 Apple, Vitamania, 1996, 13. 26 Elmer Verner McCollum, A History of Nutrition: The Sequence of Ideas in Nutrition Investigations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 148. 27 Memos, Folder: Charles F. Langworthy, Box 725, Entry 20, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Hazel E. Munsell to Sybil Smith, 17 May 1927, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 528; Louise Stanley to Hazel Munsell, 24 March 1925, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 550, Folder: Hazel E. Munsell, 1924-1930. 99 fifty rats on one vitamin experiment. They angled for large enough sample sizes that chemists working abstractly, rather than practically, on vitamins would take the work seriously.28 The

Bureau used these studies to prepare public educational materials about vitamins, like the one pictured.29 The Bureau nutritionists hoped that teaching women about how critical different vitamins were for human growth, especially for child growth and development, would compel their interest. The Bureau of Home Economics even lent out guinea pigs to high school and college classrooms to encourage students to reproduce Bureau vitamin and mineral experiments.

The rodent studies also produced original research that was translated into academic papers on nutrition.

Although the Bureau’s studies produced both education information and original research, they were not taken seriously by other scientists. The 1957 book Science in the Federal

Government did not mention home economists or nutritionists, despite substantial attention to other Department of Agriculture researchers.30 In Elmer Verner McCollum’s popular A History of Nutrition, published the same year, McCollum did not credit the Bureau of Home Economics, the field of home economics, or any female nutritionists from the agency or the major land grant universities. The only home economist he discussed was nutrition scientist Charles F.

Langworthy, who headed the Office of Home Economics until 1923.31

28 Betters, Bureau of Home Economics, 1930, 46. 29 Hazel Munsell to Hazel Stiebeling, 3 March 1932, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 533, Folder: BHE L-R; Louise Stanley to Hazel Munsell, 31 December 1930, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 533, Folder: BHE L-R; Hazel Munsell to Louise Stanley, 3 January 1931, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 533, Folder: BHE L-R. 30 A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Polices and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1957). 31 McCollum, A History of Nutrition, 1957, 190-1. 100

Figure 4: Bureau of Home Economics calcium deficiency poster, RG 16, Secretary of Agriculture, NARA II, photographs.

\

Figure 5: nutrition worker Mary Logan records the weight of a rat in a Department of Agriculture laboratory. RG 16, Secretary of Agriculture, NARA II, photographs. 101

The Vitamin or the Scale

While the Bureau of Home Economics worked to understand vitamins and minerals in nutrition, many American women were encountering nutrition information from a different perspective. In the 1920s and 1930s, female thinness came into vogue. Everywhere the slender female body was promoted. Women’s magazines and advertising started incorporating images of the thin ideal. By the 1920s, silent film starlets possessed increasingly svelte figures, while the

“flapper” image celebrated a single body type, slender and nearly curve-less. She wore long narrow dresses that she fit in with the aid of rubber girdles and flattening bras. The new styles also showed more of the body than previous styles had, and women’s bodies were increasingly understood as public rather than private sites.32 Fashionable clothes were also increasingly sold

“off the rack” rather than tailored to specific bodies. This was, in part, why the narrow dress became so popular. It was simple to mass produce. The development of all these off-the-rack clothes meant a creation of sizes and measurement standards. Those whose bodies were now labeled with an unusual size, or whose proportions did not fit within standard sizing, would now register their difference as inferiority.33 Slowly the new physical regime displaced images of women with different – especially larger – body types, and separated those older models of womanhood from the ideal.

As the ideal body shape and type for women had changed, so too did the popular attitude toward women with larger-than-ideal frames. British cardiologist Dr. Cecil Webb-Johnson explained that “a fat man is a joke, and a fat women is two jokes – one on herself and one on her husband.” Men and women were newly described as having “over-adiposity” or “the unlovely

32 Brumberg, The Body Project, 1997, 98. 33 Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 1986, 160. 102 condition of corpulence.” 34 In response to changing interest and ideals, a new commercial weight loss culture was born. Tobacco companies advertised that their products would decrease women’s appetites to help them lose weight. Some advice encouraged women to take laxatives, or to eat foods with laxative effects. One critic described the recommendation of paraffin oil on crackers as an “oil enema”35 Lulu Hunt Peters wrote a best-selling diet book in 1918, in which she pushed women to diet as a religious activity; to “repent” when they “sinned” by consuming excess calories.36 By the mid-1920s, dieting had become common enough among upper-middle- class girls to merit its discussion in the handbooks of women’s colleges like Mount Holyoke and

Smith. While the official handbooks encouraged “rational methods” of watching ones weight, the condemnation of “crazy diets” only shows how widespread such fad dieting was among those women.37 Weight loss pills, powders, chewing gums, soaps, and creams filled shelves; diet advice filled book and magazine pages.38

This new culture of weight obsession and fad diets concerned some nutritionists and health experts. Above all, it concerned male physicians, who saw the trend toward thin, androgynous female figures as a rejection of fertility, and thus of women’s social role.39 Their response was, as a whole, paternalistic advice. The former president of the American Medical

Association, Dr. Wendell C. Phillips, complained about the “ridiculous, unbalanced diets” which

34 Louise Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2,000 Years (London: Profile, 2011), iv, 113- 118. 35 Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets, 2011, 113-118. 36 Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 1988), 238-240. 37 Margaret A. Lowe, Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003), 143-144. 38 Susan Yager, The Hundred Year Diet: America’s Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight (New York: Rodale, 2010), 39-51. 39 Resolution passed by the Illinois State Medical Society, Peoria, Illinois, May 23rd, 1929, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 538, Folder: Dietetics; Resolution of the Minnesota State Medical Association, 1929, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 538, Folder: Dietetics; Resolution passed by Nebraska State Medical Association, n.d., National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 538, Folder: Dietetics. 103 young American women were taking up. “How many women realize,” he asked, “that by wrong methods of reducing they may forfeit the privilege of motherhood?”40 He explained that all

American women seemed to be trying to fit into one mold and turn themselves into a perfect size sixteen. Dr. Harlow Brooks, a leader of the New York Academy of Medicine, seconded the concern. “Would young girls work so zealously, I wonder, for boyish figures if they realized that by so doing they were endangering their chances of motherhood?”41 He went on to note that middle-aged business men would never so unquestioningly submit to “physical detrainers” or fad diets, not the way these young women were doing. Indeed, said American Medical Association investigator Dr. Arthur Cramp, women’s desperation for a svelte figure left them vulnerable to all sorts of charlatans and predators. Cramp explained that it was “usually the woman who exercises too little and eats unwisely … believes that somewhere there must surely be a panacea that without personal efforts or a change in habits will transform her from a ‘stylish stout’ to a lissome ‘boyish form.’” He mocks the despairing woman, imagining her as a Hamlet demanding that her “too, too solid flesh would melt.”42 But melt it would not. For these men, the diet culture of young American women in the 1920s proved a nerve-wracking sight. It was a threat to medical expertise, to gender roles, and the institutional power of the American Medical

Association.

40 Wendell C. Phillips, Introduction to Your Weight and How to Control It: A Scientific Guide by Medical Specialists and Dieticians, ed. Morris Fishbein (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1929), vii. 41 Harlow Brooks, “The Price of a Boyish Form,” in Your Weight and How to Control It: A Scientific Guide by Medical Specialists and Dieticians, ed. Morris Fishbein (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1929), 31. 42 Arthur J. Cramp, “Fooling the Fat,” in Your Weight and How to Control It: A Scientific Guide by Medical Specialists and Dieticians, ed. Morris Fishbein, (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1929), 39. 104

Figure 6: The small network of home economics nutritionists. Those pictured at this meeting (undated, but probably mid-to-late 1920s) include Flora Rose (first row, left of center), Louise Stanley (first row, third from right), Helen Atwater (first row, third from left), Charles Langworthy (last row, second from left) and Miriam Birdseye of Agricultural Extension (second row, first from right). NARA II, RG 310, Records of the Agricultural Research Service, Entry 1001, Box 1, Folder Chronology of Organization Change.

Most home economists worked to turn the conversation about weight into a conversation about nutrition. A couple of academic home economists created their own anti-fad diet weight loss materials, focused on food composition rather than calories. Nutritionists within the Bureau of Home Economics, meanwhile, struggled with women’s letters about dieting. Some letters were about the weight of children. “What will reduce the flesh or fat on my little girl as she is 105 only 11 years and she is getting so fat,” one mother asked.43 Most letters about weight, however, were inquiries into how adult women could gain or lose weight. Women regularly sent the

Bureau letters about weight loss and weight gain, apparently seeking advice from an authoritative, scientific women’s agency in a society saturated with diet fads and gimmicks.

Flora Rose and Mary Henry, two nutritionists and Home Economics professors from

Cornell University, authored several chapters of weight advice for the American Medical

Association (AMA). The AMA’s 1927 book, Your Weight and How to Control It, contained thirteen essays on weight and weight reduction by male doctors. The majority of these texts centered on calling out the foolish beliefs and habits of young American women and finding alternative ways for them to control their bodies. After the essays, however, Rose and Henry had about a hundred pages of the book in which they wrote about American women’s weight. As the practical, home economics voice, the women were primarily meant to provide the advice aspects of the book on diets. The first two-hundred-fifty pages were critique of both American weight and American dietary practices. The remainder of the book was meant to provide a sort of alternative.

Rose and Henry wrote about how the body needed and used protein, calcium, minerals, and water. The pair explained the importance of attending to all food groups when planning a diet, even a weight loss diet. The home economists argued that body weight could be important, but that “quality of bodily mass” was more important than the poundage itself. Dieters were to understand their foods as belonging either to milk, eggs, meat, fruit, vegetables, cereals, grains, sugars, fats, or cod liver oil. Rose and Henry emphasized the importance of milk consumption,

43 The Children’s Bureau referred letters about diet to the Bureau of Home Economics, see Mrs. T.C. Clopton to Julia Lathrop, 1 November 1928, Folder 4-6-4-1, Box 272, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Blanche M. Haines to Mrs. T.C. Clopton, 30 November 1928, Folder 4-6-4-1, Box 272, Entry 3, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 106 vitamins, and following federal nutrition advice. “To neglect … building materials and regulators

… is to court the disaster which may come from undermined tissues or poorly regulated body functions,” Rose and Henry explained. The information the women provided is similar to what the women taught their Cornell classes about scientifically reducing weight while avoiding nutrient deficiencies.44 Ultimately, Rose and Henry treated the presumably female readership with more respect than the author nutritionists had. Rose and Henry emphasized that, for the most part, “Attempts at weight control may be looked upon as the result of an earnest desire to improve health.”45 This stood in stark contrast to discussions of the naïve and foolish women included in the remainder of the AMA’s book. Dieting women were not an abstraction for university or government home economists the way they may have been for other nutritionists.

Rather, dieting women were a major constituency.

The chemists of the Bureau of Home Economics, like Rose and Henry, were regularly confronted with questions about weight and diets from their audience.46 American women had come to rely on the agency for information about nutrition, and expected that the woman-led scientific agency would assist them as they tried to find reputable information about both their own and their children’s weights. The Bureau, however, first dismissed all discussions of weight loss and gain as unscientific. As a result, the Bureau did not proactively address weight issues the way Rose and Henry had done. Instead, it focused on vitamins and minerals while restless

American women pushed for information directly about weight. As an advisory agency tasked specifically with meeting the needs of American homemakers, however, the Bureau would

44 Lowe, Looking Good, 2003, 135. 45 Flora Rose and Mary Henry, Part II: Principles of Nutrition, and Diets and Menus for Reducing and Gaining Weight,” in Your Weight and How to Control It: A Scientific Guide by Medical Specialists and Dieticians, ed. Morris Fishbein (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1929), 144-6. 46 “Diet in Relation to Obesity and Underweight,” original date unclear, original destroyed May 1924, Folder: States Relations Service, Box 1, Entry 6/9/09, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD. 107 eventually need to compromise between its scientific and advisory discourses in the name of keeping its audience contented.

During the 1920s, the Bureau received letter after letter about weight. As early as 1926,

Louise Stanley acknowledged that among the many different sorts of questions the Bureau received, questions like “is a diet of eggs and tomatoes good for reducing weight?” are “not unusual.”47 Some women requested information on fad diets, and others made individual requests, such as one 210 pound woman who asked how she could lose “thirty pounds in thirty days.”48 One woman asked that the Bureau “send me your bulletins on increasing weight,” and must have been surprised to find that the Bureau published no bulletins of the sort. The 112 pound, thirty-two year old woman had simply assumed that the Bureau would be prepared to help with such a request.49 After all, weight was everywhere in popular culture.

Bureau home economists consistently responded with advice on their main interests, vitamins, minerals, and food groups. The Bureau of Home Economics advised women to focus on meeting all their daily dietary needs before changing their weight, especially dieting or

“reducing.” In response to the 112 pound woman trying to gain weight, Stanley explained that the bulletin on good proportions in the diet could substitute for information directly on weight.

“In any diet,” Stanley wrote, “it is necessary first of all to meet the needs of the body for protein,

47 Louise Stanley, “Composition of Foods,” 1926 Agricultural Yearbook manuscript, 14 June 1926. NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 176 Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 535, Folder Composition; “Is the Teaching of Home Economics Developing a Standard Diet?,” Woman Citizen (August 1926), National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 538, Folder: Dietetics 48 Letters, National Agricultural Library Special Collections, Bureau of Home Economics and Human Nutrition, Box 5, Folder Bot-Bri and Folder Bro-Bt. 49 Nita Hatcher (Valier, Illinois) to Home Ec, 19 March 1929, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 176 Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 1, Box 12, Folder Hat-Hd.; Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Home Economics for the Fiscal Year ending June 30th, 1926, September 28, 1926, 27, Folder: Reports of the Chief, Box 594, Entry 5, RG 176 Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 108 minerals, and vitamins, as explained in the bulletin.”50 Stanley did not fully ignore the woman’s question; she recommended milk and “plenty of rest.” Stanley did not, however, address the woman’s question in the terms the woman likely hoped.

By 1931, the frequency of letters on weight and physique grew to the point that Stanley and aides composed form letters for quick responses. The responses emphasized that “care should be taken to supply enough minerals, vitamins, efficient protein, and bulk to keep the body in good health while at the same time limiting the calories.” Fruits and vegetables were good for weight loss, the form letter addressing weight reduction explained, while sugars and starches were not going to help the dieters. The Bureau typically included a pamphlet about food groups, designed to help women figure out what to feed themselves and their families, with responses to weight loss queries. Following the Bureau’s nutrition advice, they repeated, would leave you healthy. Bureau letters were typically uncomfortable even suggesting a link between health and weight.

A second form letter aimed at any requests about physique (for example: weight gain, weight loss, and worries about children’s heights) also encouraged deference to medical authorities. “Before any person starts to make a radical change in weight in either direction, it is wise to obtain the advice of a competent physician,” said the Bureau writers. They then listed basic nutrition information described as supplementing that medical advice.51 Some have argued that as the role of the professional pediatrician and the well-child visit increased by the 1930s, it chipped away at the authority of lay women’s role in health care. No doubt it did. For the

Bureau, however, the fact that doctors relied less heavily on weight charts than public health

50 Louise Stanley to Nita Hatcher, 29 March 1929, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 176 Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 1, Box 12, Folder Hat-Hd. 51 Louise Stanley, form letter on weight, Records of the Bureau of Home Economics and Human Nutrition, NARA RG 176, Entry 2, Box 541, Folder Mimeographed Materials. 109 official or Children’s Bureau volunteers was a plus for these stubbornly science-minded home economists.52 Women in the Bureau of Home Economics intended to improve letter writers’ health by encouraging them to rethink the concept of physical health by focusing on vitamins rather than pounds.

Form letters and referral to medical authorities did not cap the flow of inquiries. As letters continued to reach the Bureau, Bureau Chief Louise Stanley reasoned that the volume of letters suggested that “‘protein,’ ‘carbohydrate,’ and ‘calorie’ must be used as household words throughout the country.”53 The Bureau of Home Economics staked its reputation on its responsiveness to citizen concerns, and as a result could not simply ignore the stream of letters asking for reducing advice and weight guidelines.54 First, its funding was still tied to the general understanding that the agency would help women, that the Bureau did applied rather than abstract chemistry.55 It needed to help women with those applications. Second, the flow of letters and popular attitudes toward weight suggested that the Bureau ought to intervene into the popular fray and offer its scientific-yet-accessible voice. Popular fad diets and novelties threatened to crowd out reputable advice, Stanley observed.56

The Bureau of Home Economics conceptualized physique and the body through vitamin studies and calorie analysis. Building the body was important, but weight itself was peripheral,

52 Jeffrey P. Brosco, “Weight Charts and Well-Child Care: How the Pediatrician Became the Expert on Child Health,” Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 155 (2001): 1385-1389. 53 Louise Stanley, “Composition of Foods,” mss. for 1926 Yearbook of Agriculture, 14 June 1926, Records of the Bureau of Home Economics and Human Nutrition, NARA RG 176, Entry 2, Box 535, Folder Composition. 54 Charles F. Brannan, Secretary of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library, Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Beltsville, MD, 1948, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Bureau of Home Economics Celebration 55 Charles Langworthy (?), “Experiment and Research Work, Office of Home Economics,” draft, n.d., Folder: Mss., Box 594, Entry 5, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 56 Hazel Munsell to Louise Stanley, 12 February 1931, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 533, Folder: BHE L-R; Hazel Stiebeling to Louise Stanley, 13 February 1931, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 533, Folder: BHE L-R; Louise Stanley to Hazel Stiebeling, 20 February 1931, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 533, Folder: BHE L-R. 110 and no guarantee of health. As controversy slowly developed regarding the safety and usefulness of extreme weight loss, the Bureau needed to provide the nutrition science-based counterpoint to faddism.57 In this instance, intervention into a public health problem, even one discussed in terms the Bureau would not have taken up on its own, became necessary.

The Bureau adjusted its agenda accordingly, and began to – occasionally – discuss weight as a component of health. By the early 1930s, the Bureau of Home Economics attempted to address public concerns in a pamphlet called Consider Your Weight: Fatter, Thinner, or ‘As Is’.

The pamphlet likely owed about half to public pressure, and about half to the 1930 appointment of Dr. Hazel Stiebeling to the position of Head of the Section of Food Economics in the Food and Nutrition Division. Stiebeling was fresh from graduate school, having earned her PhD in chemistry just two years prior. While at Columbia University Teacher’s College for both her undergraduate and master’s work, Stiebeling assisted home economist and nutritionist Dr. Mary

Schwartz Rose. Mary Rose herself moved between the world of home economics and the world of nutrition, and had published work on the importance of weighing and measuring children.58

Stiebeling never made weight a focus of her own research, and had written a dissertation on vitamins – very much in line with Bureau ideas about health.59 Still, Stiebeling must have become familiar with the practice of child weighing for health, and the role of weight as a health measurement, early in her career. It is unclear exactly how or why the Bureau decided to compose Consider Your Weight, and there does not appear to have been anyone within the

57 The Bureau kept piles of information on and critiques of fad dieting in its files. The specific piece I reference here is: Federal Trade Commission, “Fake Advertisements Suggest Remedies for Six Ailments,” Press Release - For Release in Morning Newspapers of Monday, April 20, 1931, National Archives II, College Park, MD, RG 176: Bureau of Home Economics, Entry 3, Box 565, Folder: Labor - Children's Bureau 1923-1932. See especially National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 538 on food utilization. 58 Jacqueline L. Dupont and Alfred E. Harper, “Hazel Katherine Stiebeling, (1896-1989),” Nutrition Reviews 60, no. 10 (October 2002): 344-345. 59 Alfred E. Harper, “Contributions of Women Scientists in the US to the Development of Recommended Dietary Allowances,” Journal of Nutrition 133, no. 11 (November 2003): 3698-3702. 111

Bureau pushing for this sort of publication. It seems, then, that the pressure of fad diet culture and American women seeking weight advice must have been a major contributing factor to the creation of Consider Your Weight.

Compared to the tables of the Children’s Bureau and the specific over and underweight percentiles used by social workers and physicians, the 1933 publication Consider Your Weight took a cautious approach to weight. The vague discussion of averages speaks to reluctance on the part of the Bureau’s writers to invest too heavily in weight statistics. “If you weigh decidedly more or less than the average weight for your height and age,” the pamphlet explains, “it’s up to you either to do something about it, or to prove that you are in your best health ‘as is.’”60 Even when they did bring percentages into the conversation (once), they were full of caveats rather than the clear dictates of competing sources. For the overweight, the pamphlet asked: “Are you overweight? Be sure you are before you begin to worry. If your weight is within ten to fifteen percent of the average for your height and weight, don’t try to reduce.”61 Again, the booklet offered no chart to aid in determining these numbers, emphasizing that most women who want to reduce do not scientifically need to do so.

The pamphlet began like most popular diet materials, suggesting that women might not

“look or feel as well as when [they] were more slender.”62 Fad diets, however, were not the answer. The authors emphasized the dangers of losing too much weight, citing issues like fatigue, “nervous strains,” and susceptibility to tuberculosis.63 While the Bureau told the women looking to lose weight that this was an acceptable goal, they insisted the women abandon popular

60 Rowena Schmidt and Hazel K. Stiebeling, “Consider Your Weight: Fatter, Thinner, or ‘As Is,” Washington DC: United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Home Economics, 1, National Archives, RG 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Entry 2, Box 541. 61 “Consider Your Weight,” RG 176, NARA II, 1. 62 “Consider Your Weight,” RG 176, NARA II, 1. 63 “Consider Your Weight,” RG 176, NARA II, 1. 112 dieting trends in their effort to shed those pounds. “REMEMBER,” they concluded, “the only safe way to change body weight is to modify a WELL BALANCED DIET.”64 Having received many letters grounded in public dieting culture, as well as observing increasing fad diets and quack solutions, the Bureau was compelled to offer its own perspective on the issue.

In 1934 revisions to the same weight pamphlet, the Bureau appeared just a little more invested in weight, and a little more comfortable promoting a stricter set of standards and a harder line against those whose weight fell outside of bodily norms. Moreover, rather than portraying dieting as something to be done only if truly necessary, a subtle emphasis on the need for more women to diet permeated the revised pamphlet. The pamphlet now told women that

“There are, you know, boundary lines above or below which we should not go if our weight is to be desirable for our build at any age.”65 While the previous pamphlet mentioned upper and lower limits, it had wavered on the relation between these numbers and health. Rowena Carpenter and

Hazel Stiebeling, the Bureau agents who wrote this piece, still did not include a height-weight table or refer to any specific external source of such tables, but they did emphasize the increased role played by insurance companies in defining physical standards. They alluded to charts not included, perhaps assuming women already had access to or were familiar with some set of standards. The women explained that height-weight charts were the “best guides we now have.”

The cautious endorsement was also accompanied by the recommendation that women adjust whatever chart they use to accommodate their own body build and age. While cautious, the endorsement of the chart is a step toward acceptance of weight-as-health measurements. It is also evidence that the Bureau, while critical of fad diets, was not as condescending as other scientists to American women concerned with weight. “Weight isn’t just a matter of personal vanity,” the

64 “Consider Your Weight,” RG 176, NARA II, 8. 65 Rowena Schmidt Carpenter and Hazel K. Stiebeling, “Consider Your Weight,” (Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, 1934), 1. 113

Bureau defended. “It is really an indication of how things are going inside of us.”66

Only two versions of Consider Your Weight appear to have been made, 1933 and 1934 editions. Those pamphlets were never formatted in the style of most government materials, and did not go through the government printing office. The illustrations were hand drawn for both versions, and the pamphlets appear to have been mimeographed by the Bureau. It is unclear why the approach to these pamphlets was so different than the approach to the other advisory pamphlets made by the Bureau. Presumably, the agency was not interested in providing, or not able to provide, substantial resources to addressing the issue. The pamphlets that were printed flew off the shelves and were re-copied, so the materials were popular.67 Since the Bureau of

Home Economics approached the issue of weight, dieting, and health with trepidation before

1933, it may have been quick to drop the issue when it became busy with other projects in

Depression and war. Although dieting literature and weight-loss pills remained in circulation through the 1930s and 1940s, interest waned. Increasingly, popular culture portrayed dieting as frivolous amid the economic and political issues at hand.68 The Bureau, as receptive to changes in popular culture as the advisory agency needed to be, followed the popular lead. It killed off

Consider Your Weight and funneled its energy into pamphlets on low-cost and vitamin-heavy meal plans aimed at Depression-era homemakers.

Conclusion

In her classic 1982 study of female scientists, Margaret Rossiter described home economists as “treading the narrow path between …two cultures” and trying to meet “the

66 Carpenter and Stiebeling, “Consider Your Weight,” 1. 67 Parkinson to Rowena Schmidt Carpenter, 21 March 1935, National Archives II, College Park, MD, RG 176 Records of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, Box 558, Folder Carpenter, Rowena 1933-1937 68 Brumberg, Fasting Girls, 1988, 246. 114 pressures for both prestige and practicality.”69 It was from that position that the Bureau of Home

Economics functioned as an advisory agency in the 1920s and 1930s. The nutritionists within the

Bureau were trained biochemists, and approached food and diet issues with scientific rigor. They drew on Wilbur Atwater’s research on calories, but also pushed further to focus on the vitamin, mineral, and nutrient content of human diets. The advisory agency worked to disseminate its ideas on nutrition with mixed success. Although the American public became increasingly invested in vitamins and minerals, the public (especially the Bureau’s mainly female public) became far more invested in body weight and reducing diets.

Here advisory state employees negotiated the terrain between the nutrition work they wanted to do and the nutrition work which would be appealing to their audience. Although the

Bureau’s own approach to American health had not been weight-driven, the Bureau needed to meet the demand of the women who sought its advice. Those women expected the Bureau to provide practical, expert advice. As Hazel Stiebeling and Charles F. Brannan explained at the

Bureau’s anniversary party, the Bureau of Home Economics was unlike other agencies because of its intimate relationship with its audience. An advisory agency such as the Bureau of Home

Economics could not thrive without meeting public expectations, or without its target audience actively participating in its agenda. The Bureau sought to develop a more “rational” female consumer, one who chose foods for their nutrient composition rather than their flavor.70 When the target consumer proved continued to demand information about weight loss and gain, the

Bureau tried to ignore the requests they deemed “unscientific,” but eventually adapted. If it could not fully set the terms of the nutrition discussion that it desired, it could at least make scientific nutrition part of the popular discourse on weight loss.

69 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 1982, 67. 70 Louise Stanley, undated speech draft, 1, Box 601, Entry 5, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 115

I turn next to an agency with far different constraints. Like the Bureau of Home

Economics, the Civilian Conservation Corps sought to alter American health and physique in the

1930s. Yet the agencies had different audiences, different approaches to the body, and different political strategies. The Bureau was staffed primarily by women, while the Civilian Conservation

Corps was a male-run agency. The Bureau’s audience was also female, while the Corps primarily targeted young men. The differences in agency composition and audience mattered. The Civilian

Conservation Corps, a well-funded agency set-up as a temporary fix to a social and economic crisis in the country did not have to constantly maintain its expertise or authority the way the

Bureau did. It also did not need to gently coax Americans to follow its advice. The Civilian

Conservation Corps, instead, would reinforce its ideas about what American men should eat and how they should look by directly changing the bodies of those men. It enrolled men in rural and forest camps, where it fed and exercised them. This very different relationship between the state and the citizen body foretells some more coercive body projects, but also helps to illuminate the possibilities and limits of the advisory state. The Corps would not need to negotiate its understanding of nutrition science in an effort to better appeal to its audience. Most understood the male-led, resource-rich, and politically-popular Civilian Conservation Corps as entitled to the directive power it wielded.

116

Chapter 4 Builder of Men: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Muscular State

James McEntee, a Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), believed that his agency’s camps were rebuilding American male bodies. “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?” he asked in the pamphlet, Now They Are Men. “If you have,” McEntee continued, “you are almost certain to have seen a striking change in his physical appearance.” These men’s posture was improved, their muscles hardened, their cheeks ruddy, and their scrawny bodies “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 CCC sought to provide that 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.”2 Physical development would be a cloaking language for improving men’s economic circumstance. Using both advisory and directive state projects, the Civilian Conservation Corps set out to improve the bodies and circumstances of young American men.

The making of a male breadwinner through hands-on physical reshaping was a new development in the American advisory state, and would have been impossible without the advisory state body projects that came before it. From Atwater’s laboratories came the idea that food could be carefully monitored to improve citizens’ bodies. By the 1930s, the idea of the

1 James McEntee, Now They Are Men: The Story of the C.C.C. (National Home Library Foundation, Washington D.C., 1940,) 58, RG 35, Entry 53, Division of Selection, Publications, 1939-42. 2 Wesley C. Cox, “The Morale of Good Health,” in The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ed. Alfred C. Oliver, Jr. and Harold M. Dudley (London: Longmans, Green and Company), 1937, 44. 117 laboring body as a machine, with nutrition as its fuel, was widespread.3 Likewise, the explosion of interest in height-weight during the 1920s put poundage into the American vocabulary and made the bathroom scale a familiar technology. Americans increasingly understood their bodies to be quantifiable, and to represent some larger meaning about an individual’s social and political value. The advisory projects of the Agricultural Extension Station, the Children’s

Bureau, and the Bureau of Home Economics provided an unacknowledged foundation for Corps projects. These Corps predecessors relied on advisory state methods like education, scientific expertise, and advice-giving. They had small budgets and leaders with mainly indirect political influence (especially female agency leaders). Given these circumstances, these agencies worked almost entirely through advisory mechanisms.

The CCC was founded in very different conditions, which allowed for the development of body projects beyond the scope of the advisory state. The Corps had more funding and more influence than the agencies that came before. 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. The difference is striking even when factoring in large projects like Sheppard-Towner Act appropriations (money sent directly to the states under the aegis of the Children’s Bureau). 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.4 Forty million dollars of that was just for

3 Caroline Hunt to Charles Langworthy, 27 November 1923, Folder: Charles F. Langworthy, Box 725, Entry 20, Record Group 176, Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. 4 Annual Report of the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Fiscal Year ended June 30 1938. US Government Printing Office: Washington, 1938, 92-93; Department of Labor Appropriation Bill for 1938, HR 5779, 75th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record, 169, 188. 118

“subsistence.” The Children’s Bureau could give advice on food, but the Corps could dish it out by the pound.

For those men actually living in Corps camps, the Corps’ body project was coercive and enforceable. Men labored, ate, and exercised the CCC way. This was not advisory, it was directive. The all-male Corps leadership had resources that the Children’s or Home Economic

Bureaus could only dream of. The Corps had the eager ear of the President, money in its pocket, and direct access to its subjects on a daily basis. The health emergency it wanted to address was widely acknowledged. In different circumstances, this directive project would have been unimaginable. Yet for about 200,000 young men each year of the Corps’ existence, the American body project was an astonishingly intimate one. These young men, cast by the Corps as malleable “boys,” could be subjected to directive body projects ranging from mandatory calisthenics to arduous physical labor. These “boys” were being domesticated in the eyes of the

CCC, turned from imagined bands of vagrants and multi-ethnic drifters, into productive proto- breadwinners.5

The Corps was not, however, solely a hands-on entity. It balanced directive body projects within camps with widespread advisory body projects aimed beyond the camps. Corps leadership

– from President Franklin Roosevelt on down – imagined their project shaping men far beyond camps for select young enrollees. Believing the American breadwinner model to be seriously in crisis, the Corps’ leadership publicized Corps men’s physical change. 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, “is that I am told you men have put on an average of twelve

5 Domesticized and, as we know in retrospect, militarized through almost the same discourses and practices. 119 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. Through the Corps, building muscular, white, male bodies was conflated with building a prosperous and socially stable nation. To the extent Corps director McEntee and his predecessor tried to sell the idea of muscular, productive, and breadwinning male bodies outside of the camp context, they built a nation-wide advisory body project.

Origins of the Corps

The end of World War I and subsequent homecoming of large numbers of traumatized or physically disabled young men dealt a blow to ideals of American masculinity. The Great

Depression dealt another. As the male breadwinner role of young, white American men was threatened, so too was the entire imagined family unit. McEntee argued that forest-based work camps like those of the Corps could rebuild this beleaguered manhood. The Camps sought to fix what many saw as the backbone of American masculinity: the male breadwinner family model.

Corps men were not simply compensated with an assumption they would use the funds to maintain the white, heterosexual, family model imagined by the camp. This assumption was reinforced when the majority of a tree soldiers’ earnings were sent directly to his family. The generally unmarried young men were meant to be supplementing their fathers’ income, rather than supporting their own families. The carefully orchestrated distribution of funds served as a baby step towards the breadwinning model. Corps men were often imagined as entering the CCC as scrawny, naïve “boys.” It was only after CCC participation that they emerged, in the words of

McEntee, as men ready to be the breadwinners for their own households.

6 The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1938), 322. 120

A decade of American agricultural depression, combined with the stock market crash of

1929, made for economic disaster. By the very early 1930s, about 250,000 young men and women (primarily men) wandered the nation in search of work. While these so-called “drifters” and “tramps” loomed large in the American imagination, a broader swath of young American men found themselves unemployable. 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 reshaped American social life. An early historian of the

Corps described this population as “bewildered, sometimes angry, but more often hopeless and apathetic.”7 The troubling image of these disaffected male youth was difficult to shake.

Unemployed (and thus extra-familial) masculinity was imagined as dangerous, as 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. While the reality was that young American men came from all sorts of family units, the idealized family unit was explicitly heterosexual, implicitly white and middle-class, and contained one couple and their children (it was not multi-generational, as was 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.8

7 John A. Salmond, Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham: Duke, 1967), 3- 4. 8 Anna R. Igra, Wives Without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion and Welfare in New York, 1930–35 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2007), Ruth Milkman, “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression,” Review of Radical Political Economics 8, no. 1 (April 1976): 71-97; Laura Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1995); Elaine 121

In the eyes of leaders like Civilian Conservation Corps Director Robert Fechner and his successor McEntee, unattached men posed a threat to the social fabric. As a director of the

National Youth Administration explained, in support of CCC expansion, young men without the responsibilities of a job, home, and family were “a volatile element in society.”9 “They have everything to gain by a change in the established order and nothing to lose.”10 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 the simple economic structure that it would be nostalgically remembered as. Changes in how Americans imagined families to work, though, are almost as important as changes in how the unit actually functioned. When an unemployed man ceased to be a breadwinner, he ceased to be a metaphorical head of the household. The unemployed man seemed undeserving of respect from his wife or children. Youth were imagined delinquent in unstable family units. Women might need to work outside the home, seemingly emasculating their husbands 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.11 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 seem to have imagined, there would be nothing to hold men back from their unsavory natural state.

S. Abelson, “Women Who Have No Men to Work for Them: Gender and Homelessness in the Great Depression, 1930-1934,” Feminist Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 104-127. 9 Richard R. Brown, “What is Happening to Youth,” This New America: The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Ed. Alfred C. Oliver, Jr. and Harold M. Dudley, (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1937), 16. 10 Brown, “What is Happening to Youth,” 1937, 16. 11 Margot Canaday, The Straight State (Princeton: Princeton, 2009). 122

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 rather than as a feminized dependence on the state. The program was saturated with images and claims of masculinity. Alongside the manly independent worker was the image of the militarized man, and forest enrollees were soon dubbed “tree soldiers.” As workers, CCC men would be independent and autonomous. As soldiers, these men would be 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 pre-military program and autonomous, self-defined independent men. The Civilian Conservation Corps would have both an advisory and a directive role in the lives and bodies of its enrollees.

The endangered manhood McEntee imagined was at its root economic, a problem of men unable to win family-supporting jobs. The Corps, in turn, would provide these men with temporary jobs and the idea that male income was meant to support a family. The program directors rarely spoke directly about the money involved in the program, though. Although the

CCC was a social welfare program based in work, a program built on its opposition to charity or

“unearned” welfare, talk of payment was still talk of federal social welfare. In a culture that linked economic independence with masculinity and economic dependence with femininity, a focus on men as welfare recipients only further damaged their already besieged manhood.

Instead, the language often used to discuss the program was that of the young, white male body.

Corps publicity and rhetoric focused on the transformation of scrawny, urban male bodies into robust, muscular forms. The extensive CCC use of film and news reels focused on strapping, shirtless laborers reinforced this idea nation-wide. “The fact that enrollees gain so much weight 123 is proof that it is good for them,” explained one Corps pamphlet.12 At a moment when the idealized female body was slender and weak, the idealization of young white men as husky and muscular spoke to stark difference in social expectations. The built-up male body and the pounds added to it functioned as shorthand for the transformation of a boy into a man poised as breadwinner, family anchor, and productive economic and social citizen.

Figure 1: FDR visiting a Virginia CCC camp, 1933. “I am told you men have put on an average of twelve pounds each,” Roosevelt told the men. “I am trying to lose twelve pounds.” Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-93597

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. Dorothea Lange’s

12 “Work Experience that Counts,” (Washington: Government Printing Press, 1941), 15, NARA II, RG 35, Entry 102, Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications, 1933-1942, Box 5 Folder: Work Experience that Counts. 124 photographs captured the sunken eyes and hunger-stricken faces of Depression-era migrant children. When resources are limited, food is an elastic expense. While they could not cut easily back on rent, Americans could cut back on food when their pocketbooks were empty. The result of these cutbacks was malnutrition and sickness. Food relief managed by local charities was inadequate, while clients found early federal relief programs, with long public lines and goods they did not choose, embarrassing.13 Malnourished children, urban and rural, haunted the national imagination. Visuals of bread lines and underweight children complemented scientific research on American bodies. Researchers produced varied numbers, but most studies showed about twenty percent of American children as malnourished. Some reports were more extreme, suggesting deficiencies in seventy or eighty-five percent of children.14

While those underweight children, innocents, haunted the American imagination, they were not the only undernourished people in the country. Single men, for instance, were often ineligible for food aid, which was often distributed to families. Even by 1935, when a federal

“commodities” program was set up to distribute agricultural excess to the needy, single men were usually excluded.15 The federal Food Stamp Plan, initiated in 1939, explicitly excluded

“unattached men.”16 While women and children were imagined as innocents who might depend on federal resources, many believed that men without families would only become more shiftless and irresponsible if they were given benefits. At best, urban single men might find private charity through soup kitchens and breadlines. Outside the urban setting, organized relief was harder to come by. This literal hunger and malnutrition was filtered through gendered cultural

13 Janet Poppendieck, Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1986), 20. 14 Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton: Princeton, 2008), 40-41. 15 Poppendieck, Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat, 1986, 24. 16 Rachel Louise Moran, “Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal,” Journal of American History 97, no. 4 (March 2011): 1001-1022. 125 lenses. Rather than malnourished, the way hungry women and children were described, underfed white men were “weak.” Weak male bodies, in turn, were often read as effeminate and sexually perverse. Poor nutrition and the resultant poor physique of Depression Era men could hold meaning far beyond ill health.

The underfed bodies of these men matched their unrealized breadwinner status.

Depression-era economics had produced underweight male bodies, bodies that were considered physically weak and not masculine. 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.”17

In March of 1933, a joint committee session of the seventy-third Congress met to consider S. 598, the bill that would create the Civilian Conservation Corps. The bill promised a trade: “relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work.”18 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, and receive food, room and board, clothing, and medical attention. The Corps would enlist about 250,000 men to start.

17 Louis J. Sampel, CCC Benefit Letter, Tilford, South Dakota, 14 December 1935. NARA II, RG 35, E 99. 18 “Unemployment Relief,” March 23 1933, Joint Session of the Committee on Education and Labor and the Committee on Labor of the House of Representatives, 1. 126

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins described the Civilian Conservation Corps “as entirely a relief measure.” Perkins endorsed the program, but clarified that she did not consider it a threat to organized labor or an expansion of federal employment. 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 not physically up to the task. Perkins asked Congress to remember the voluntary nature of the “projects” which 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 safety of Corps men than the possibility that low CCC wages would depress all wages. The Corps has to be understood as voluntary labor and as relief pay. In the short term this would appease organized labor groups. In the long term, the emphasis on the voluntary and relief nature of the program would allow Corps leadership to intervene in the bodies of its workers in ways few civilian organizations could.19

19 “Unemployment Relief,” March 23 1933, Joint Session of the Committee on Education and Labor and the Committee on Labor of the House of Representatives, p. 21-26. 127

Figure 2: Robert Fechner, First director of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1939), Time magazine, Feb. 6 1939. Magazine caption reads “The Spade is Mightier than the Sword.”

Once the Corps was established, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Robert Fechner director.

The selection of Fechner was another attempt at calming unions and explaining 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 began 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 list of men was drawn 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 128 services, was the young man finally able to enlist.20 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.21

Enrollees also almost always needed to be male. A couple of camps of female workers were created, but they primarily used women for sewing projects. Technically this was agricultural work, as these women were meant to transform a substantial surplus of Southern cotton into sellable goods. Still, these female CCC members never fit the Corps imaginary, or earned the nickname of tree soldiers. 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.

The CCC imagined itself making boys into “men,” not managing women. Corps leadership 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. Colonel Major, a high-ranking 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.”22 The Colonel’s views on the subject were

20 Bay Minette Alabama, Hugh Ford, 7 December 1935, Box 2 Folder Letters from CCC Enrollees RE benefits received while in the corps, National Archives II, College Park, MD, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry 99. 21 Dr. Rice (?), Mss. “Training Division: Medical Selection,” April 1942 (?). National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry 21, Records Relating to the Proposed Merger of the National Youth Administration and the CCC, Box 1, Folder: Medical Reports. 22 Salmond, Civilian Conservation Corps , 1967, 48. 129 extreme; both Fechner and Roosevelt supported after-work schooling for CCC boys. What is striking about the Colonel’s statement, however, is his discussion of class and gender. In his imagining, Corps camps built masculinity through hard labor, a masculinity under threat from gender nonconformists like “short haired women” and “long haired men.” In this debate over education in the camps, a debate theoretically unrelated to gender, the Colonel could only understand the program in terms of gender and sexuality. The existence of women’s camps reminded of the perceived threat from “short haired women,” ready to damage the white, heteronormative, male-breadwinner, family model which the Corps was so focused on strengthening.

The white, male-breadwinner family ideal would prove an 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.”23 While black enrollment did not compare with black Americans’ relief needs, that black Americans made up about ten 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.24 Georgia would not enroll any black men into 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.”25 Mississippi, a state in which more than fifty-percent of citizens were individuals of color, enrolled a Corps with two percent black men.26

23 Olen Cole, Jr., The African American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps. (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1999), 14. 24 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Norton, 2013). 25 Quoted in Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1967, 90. 26 Cole, The African American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1999, 14. 130

Although the CCC was actually more inclusive than many New Deal social welfare programs, it was still plagued with inequality and discrimination. Corps leadership was focused on improving the imagined white family model; there was little room in this imaginary for black men. This reality was reflected in, and reinforced by, the place of racial minorities in Corps publicity. As the white male body (and immigrant bodies made “American” through the CCC project) became a central point of New Deal propaganda, Black bodies became a segregated, shadowy image. Employing and building up white male bodies and masculinity suggested national progress. Increasing Black men’s bodies and masculinity was imagined as a danger rather than a service. Although some of the Corps leadership did support black men’s right to enroll in the program, and intervened in the states which would not enroll black men, the white

American man remained the face – and body – of the program.

The Directive Work of the CCC The Corps exerted direct authority over the bodies of men in camps. It was a welfare/work program that took only men who volunteered, and only volunteers from families already using other social services. It was the confluence of all these factors that made the Corps a space of active federal intervention: need, volunteerism, separation from normalcy, and temporariness. The CCC then took these men, marked by their economic need, and sent them far from their normal lives. Fechner believed that if men could see their families on the weekends they would not truly grow; Corps enrollees were deployed to isolated forest land around the country. These extenuating circumstances allowed the CCC to side-step the advisory state obstacles met by other agencies attempting body projects in earlier periods.

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, 131 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 directive body project. Press releases proudly stated that the average tree soldier 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 fan. “The food…is constantly under expert supervision…[the enrolled men] are given careful physical inspections at monthly intervals by the camp medical officer.”27 The food served in the camps was said to be the same as that served in 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.”28

Regularly measuring the enrollees provided data the Corps leadership could use as evidence of its own success.29 Since weight gain was conflated with manhood, economic success, and future prospects, these simple numbers were critical to the leadership.30 According to one test, men averaged a thirteen pound gain during their first eight weeks in camp. According

27 Cox, “The Morale of Good Health,” 1937, 43; The Civilian Conservation Corps: Recommendations of the Aerican Youth Commission of the American Council on Education, pamphlet, 1940, esp. 2, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 107, Office of the Secretary of War, Entry A1 E188, Box 187, Folder: CCC - General 28 Cox, “The Morale of Good Health,” 1937, 43. 29 It is unclear how often men were actually weighed, but they we supposed to be weighed once each month. Robert Fencher to Colonel Duncan K. Major, Jr., 6 July 1933, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry PI-11 2, General Correspondence, 1933-1942, Box 695, Folder: 500, War Department (Physical Examination). 30 J.J. McENtee to Major General Robert U. Patterson, 9 July 1934, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry PI-11 2, General Correspondence, 1933-1942, Box 695, Folder: 500, War Department (Report on Salient Benefits); Granville Dickey to Office of the Surgeon General, 9 April 1935, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry PI-11 2, General Correspondence, 1933-1942, Box 695, Folder: 500, War Department – Surgeon General (Physical Examination Forms); Chris H. Taylor to Surgeon General, 9 April 1935, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry PI-11 2, General Correspondence, 1933-1942, Box 695, Folder: 500, War Department – Surgeon General (Physical Examination Forms). 132 to another test conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the War Department, men gained an average of 6.04 pounds in their first eight weeks.31 Frank Persons, Special Assistant to the Director of the CCC, claimed that men gained an average of twenty pounds in their first six months.32 In another, Fechner proudly told Congress that the six month average weight gain for enrollees was an exact 7.2 pounds.33 James McEntee wrote proudly about the transformation of his men. Eighty-four per cent of all the boys who were below the minimum at the time of enrollment ate beef and potatoes and vegetables and milk to make them gain weight at a rapid rate. “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.34

Again on the more forceful end of the Corps’ spectrum, exercise supplemented the body 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.”35 The Corps’ plan for building strong men was about employment and breadwinning. Yet this was not all that the phrase “building men” meant. All of 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.

31 Box 3 Folder Food – releases- gen file Emergency Conservation Work, office of the director, press release, Notes on C.C.C. Activities Feb. 19 1937, Folder Civilian Conservation Corps, , RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942 32 Frank Persons and unnamed other writers, Bulletin no. 41, Washington: US Government Printing Press, (May 21 1940), p. 12, NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 4 Folder: Unlabeled 33 “Statement of Mr. Robert Fechner, Director of Emergency Conservation Work with Regard to the Proposed Bill for Making the Civilian Conservation Corps Permanent,” p. 14. NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 5, Folder: Statement of Mr. Robert Fechner. 34 James McEntee, Now They Are Men: The Story of the C.C.C., (National Home Library Foundation, Washington D.C., 1940,) p. 58. RG 35 E 53 Division of Selection, Publications, 1939-42, Box 1, No folder. 35 Annual Report of the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps ,for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1940, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1940, p. 9, NARA II, 35 E 3 Annual, Special, Final Reports, 1933-1943, Box 1. 133

In official Corps rhetoric, Corps Director Fechner described camps as improvements to male bodies, employability, and family relationships. Fechner wrote that “two principal benefits have been received” by his tree soldiers. One was better health, and the other improved employability. Once disaffected men left camps, he explained, “with healthy bodies, with heads up, and capable of making their own way if jobs are available.”36 While Fechner framed the benefits to bodies and bank accounts as if they were separate, at least here relationship between the two was evident. As Fechner promised to build up men, he promised them built up as a whole package. A strengthening or even a “building” from scratch of American men meant the development of one specific image of manliness. Fechner’s intention for the program was that of a domesticated yet strong, skilled and muscular man. 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.”37 While the pamphlet certainly meant this at a literal level, intending to directly improve the bodies of American men sent to Corps camps, it also functions as a metaphor. Corps bodies were made from social “excess flesh” – understood as masculinity gone soft, useless – into “hard muscle” – breadwinning, virile, masculinity. This transformation rested 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 could provide its enrollees. First on the list was “muscles hardened,” followed by vocational training and

36 Robert Fencher, quoted in Congressional Record, 75th congress, 3rd session, Washington: Government Printing Office, 3 June 1938, Civilian Conservation Corps, statement by Hon. Elbert D. Thomas of Utah on the Record of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Fiscal Year 1938, NARA II, RG 35, Entry 56, Box 1, Folder Mr. Snyder’s Field Trip January 21 – February 10, 1939. 37 Annual Report of the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps ,for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1940, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1940, 25, NARA II, RG 35 Entry 3 Annual, Special, an Final Reports, 1933-1943, Box 1. 134 education. The materials consistently conflated musculature and weight with health, and then used “health” as a stand-in for a diversity of social and economic concerns.

The promotional material 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.”38 In an annual report on the 1938 Corps, CCC leadership 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.39

One 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.”40 The Corps was supported (and partially run) by the Labor Department. 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 Labor Department’s publications reinforced their belief in the relationship between economics and male physique. “The emergency conservation work provides the

38 The Civilian Conservation Corps, US Govt. printing office 1936, Box 1 Folder Civilian Conservation Corps, , RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942 39 Excerpt from 1938 Annual Report, 1 Jun. 1937 – 30 Jun. 1938, p. 8-9, NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 1, Folder: Civilian Cons. Corps Activities. 40 Civilian Conservation Corps, “What About the C.C.C.?” booklet, draft, Washington: US Government Printing Press, 1937. NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 5, Folder: What About the CCC? 135 opportunity to build up men as well as to build trees [i.e. work],” the Department wrote in a 1933 bulletin.41 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 lands.”42 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.”43

The Advisory Corps

In its intimate regulation of food and physical activity, the Corps was a directive social welfare program. Yet as the CCC directively changed the bodies of young men in camps, it also used an advisory body project to reshape the broader American idea of what productive young male bodies ought to look like. Roosevelt, McEntee, and other Corps leadership imagined their message of physical, economic and familial strength reaching far beyond the enrolled men within those walls. Through speech, statistics, and propaganda, the CCC cast the successful enrollee body as the ideal body.

41 Bulletin No. 2 April 20 1933 United States Department of Labor, D.C., RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 1 Folder Bulletins Nos. 1 & 2 (1933), p. 1. 42 Federal Security Agency, Civilian Conservation Corps, Office of the Director, The Nation Appraises the CCC, April 1933 – Sept. 1939, (Published 1939/1940?), p. 9, NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 4 Folder: “Nation Appraises the CCC.” 43 Congressional Record, 75th congress, 3rd session, Washington: Government Printing Office, 3 June 1938, Civilian Conservation Corps, statement by Hon. Elbert D. Thomas of Utah on the Record of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Fiscal Year 1938, NARA II, RG 35, Entry 56, Box 1, Folder Mr. Snyder’s Field Trip January 21 – February 10, 1939. 136

In a nation often deeply suspicious of social welfare and expanding government, the

Civilian Conservation Corps stood out as a uniquely popular program. “Today you can ask any citizen to name what he likes in the New Deal and you will find practically everyone says The

Civilian Conservation Corps,” said the Boston Traveler.44 That popular appeal enabled the agency to influence American ideas of body, family, labor, and masculinity, indirectly touching those citizens whom the agency could not literally touch. Like Children’s Bureau health conferences or Bureau of Home Economics nutrition pamphlets, advisory technologies allowed for the physical ideals of camps to be transferred to the general public. In this capacity, the Corps was more than a directive, localized body project. The Corps revised American interpretations of the body by using the stories, images, and statistics of the men it directly built up as an advisory lesson for the rest of the country.

The weight, musculature, and physique of Conservation Corps men were part of the program’s discourse from day one. The national Corps produced a regular newspaper called

Happy Days. Individual camps also often produced papers. As these papers were meant primarily for the eyes of men at those specific camps, they could be a bit salty. Happy Days, on the other hand, was aimed at both Corps workers and their families. The editors even encouraged

Peavies to get subscriptions for their “girl” back home. The paper thus functioned as an unofficial mouthpiece of the central office. The reporting in Happy Days was not necessarily what the administration would write, and the paper could also be internally inconsistent. Still, the majority of materials aligned closely with the materials put out by the Corps administration, and

Happy Days never undermined the CCC administration. Franklin Roosevelt praised the popular

44 “CCC Boys Will Be CCC Boys,” Boston Traveler, (June 17 1939) in Federal Security Agency, Civilian Conservation Corps, Office of the Director, The Nation Appraises the CCC, April 1933 – Sept. 1939, (Published 1939/1940?), p. 20, NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 4 Folder: “Nation Appraises the CCC.” 137 paper, explaining that “it has aided in making the men of the CCC conscious that they are doing good, useful work and proud of the fact they are doing it. It has assisted also, in making the young men feel they are a part of a great National Movement for the conservation of men.45 I treat it here as Corps publicity as much as a newspaper for the actual men to whom it was supposedly written.

1933 issues of Happy Days were peppered with stories of weight gain even though the camps had hardly been open long enough to merit such boasting. In a column called “Smiles,” the editors reprinted a note from a Fort Washington camp. “I’m going to write home and tell Ma she might as well give my other suit away,” the man said. “It won’t be big enough for me when I get out of here.”46 Another story, “Leavenworth Grub Sure Must Be Good,” praised the weight gain of men during their two-week conditioning camp stints. In mid-1933, men reportedly ate eight pounds of food each day at the conditioning camps, and gained up to ten pounds during their brief stay.47 In mid-1933 the paper even printed a poem on the subject of improving physique:

A peavie from out of the west was tremendously fond of his chest, he pounded and thundered, and bellowed and blundered, and ripped all the seams of his vest!48

45 This New America: The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ed. Alfred C. Oliver, Jr. and Harold M. Dudley (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1937), 132. 46 “Smiles,” Happy Days, vol. 1, no 2, (May 27 1933), p. 9. NARA II RG 35, Entry 18 Happy Days, Box 1. 47 “Leavenworth Grub Sure Must Be Good,” Happy Days, vol. 1, no 2, (May 27 1933), p. 9. NARA II RG 35, E 18 Happy Days, Box 1. 48 Happy Days, vol. 1 no. 8, (July 8 1933), p. 12. NARA II RG 35, E 18 Happy Days, Box 1. 138

In one issue, they reported that a boy in one New Mexico camp gained eighteen pounds in a matter of months.49 In another case, a Corps man wrote to Happy Days to complain about an earlier piece on weight gain in the CCC. He was “surprised to see that the record holder has only gained 18 pounds. Pooh, pooh!” He went on to name one man who gained twenty-one pounds while in his camp – a camp he nicknamed the “Jumbo Elephants.” He continued to describe the camp weight gain, writing that “even little Elmer Wieland put on 19 and is now on a Hollywood diet, trying to keep in form. What a form!”50 The weight gain of men was not only a symbol of repaired manhood, but of a manhood secure enough to laugh over its once shameful bodies.

Other Corps publicity continued the commitment to advising about the body, and doing so through quantitative means. In the 1938 pamphlet “The CCC Offers Young Man a Chance,” they emphasized weight gain statistics. According to the pamphlet, in just half a year, “each man in the CCC is, on average, 9 pounds heavier than when he enrolled. Gains of 15 or 20 pounds are frequent.” The speed of physical transformation became more important in a war context. To make the CCC brand of physical fitness palatable, the work camps needed to promise a quick transition from work camp to battle field. The pamphlet went on, arguing that “enrollment in the

CCC may be the best opportunity many men will ever have for building up their health and strength.”51 Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself promoted the CCC by linking health gains with employment prospects and economic gain. He wrote that “the clean life and hard work in which you are engaged,” he explained, “cannot fail to help your physical condition.” Improved condition meant better individual and national prospects. “You should emerge from this

49 “Peavie Gains 18 Pounds in Camp” Happy Days, vol. 1 no. 14, (19 Aug. 1933), p. 1. NARA II RG 35, E 18 Happy Days, Box 1. 50 Happy Days 1 no. 18 (September 16 1933), 6. NARA II RG 35, Entry 18 Happy Days, Box 1. 51 The CCC Offers a Young Man a Chance, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1938), RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 1 Box 2 Folder Pamphlets Misc. 139 experience, strong and rugged,” he continues, “and ready for reentrance into the ranks of industry.”52

While industry surely mattered to the young male enrollees, they also may have had other investments in their weight gain. In a poem written by a Tennessee enrollee, the man explained the he had “gained in weight a lot / I’m Johnnie on the spot.” The benefits of weight gain were not just about economics or health for this enrollee though. He also explained that “my sweetheart even loves me better too, / For the girls admire men / Who tackle things and win. /

All the girls like husky guys who dare and do.”53 The “daring” and “doing” suggested a masculine independence, perhaps one tied to economic success. In any case, the poem was on message enough to be reproduced in a Corps-published book about the benefits of the Corps.

52 Franklin Roosevelt, quoted in “Work Experience that Counts” (Washington: Government Printing Press, 1941), 4, NARA II, RG 35 E 102 Division of Planning and Public Relations, Publications 1933-1942, Box 5 Folder: Work Experience that Counts. 53 Ovid Butler, Ed., Youth Rebuilds: Stories from the C.C.C., Washington, DC: The American Forestry Association, 1934, p. 104. 140

Figures 3-4: Above, enrollee with hammer. Below, enrollee with pipe. National Archives II, RG 33, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps 141

While quantitative discourses comprised a major way in which the Corps reached both their own enrollees and, especially, the nation at large, it was not the only approach. The Corps also used photography to communicate the message of general male improvement. The extensive photography of enrollees focused heavily on white, muscular male bodies, those that best represented the program goals of improving male lives by improving male bodies.

Regular publicity photos portrayed men with large tools at work in the forest. In most photographs, the men are bare-chested, exposing the literal improvements brought to their bodies 142 through directive Corps programing. The photographs themselves were not meant to have directive purposes, though. The men in the photographs were already in the fold of the CCC

(though it surely flattered the specifically chosen men to become Corps models, and perhaps encouraged their peers to work on becoming “huskier”) Instead, Corps photographs were an advisory tactic. The images, sent to be used in newspapers, magazines, and Corps publicity around the nation, portrayed the body-building work of the Corps in all of its glory. Like with quantification, the stylized photographs of Corps men made a complex set of CCC goals easy to disseminate. Embedded in the pectorals of the idealized white male enrollee were claims of masculine independence, breadwinner status, and freedom from feminized dependence on the state (even as he received a form social welfare). Through quantitative weight, and to a lesser extent camp visuals, the bodies of CCC enrollees were not simply the objects of directive federal action but also the medium of far-reaching advisory state action.

Letters from the Forest: The Directive and Advisory States in Conversation

The mutual reinforcement of directive and advisory approaches to the enrollee body is best illustrated in a series of “benefit letters” composed by Corps enrollees in 1935 and 1936. In

December of 1935, while directors worked to justify the continued existence and even potential expansion of the Corps, the men were asked to write letters about their experiences in the program. Stacks of letters with titles like “How the CCC Has Benefitted Me,” “What the CCC

Has Done for Me,” and “How I Benefitted by My Enrollment in the CCC” poured in for Director

Robert Fechner.

These letters were guided by the needs of the Corps director, and their words were both carefully solicited and monitored. The authors of these compelling benefit letters did not even 143 necessarily want to write them. A Minnesota camp’s educational adviser tried to encourage letter writing with a contest for the best story from each barracks. The prize was a “Flat Fifty” of cigarettes [a flat tin holding fifty cigarettes].54 At one North Carolina camp, the educational director submitted a formal report on benefits to federal headquarters instead of asking his men to write their own letters. The letters, then, do not give us access to the feelings of actual Corps enrollees toward the camps. What they give us, instead, is access to how enrollees adopted the goals and languages of the Corps directors when discussing how the CCC had benefitted them personally. Enrollees wrote frequently about their weight in these letters, often adopting the

Corps’ reliance on quantified weight numbers to stand in for improved health.

Many of the stories in the letters emphasized the tree soldiers’ weight gain. These letters were usually described as if they represented the unmediated voices of enrollees. In fact, weight gain and body building narratives were carefully crafted from above. While the beliefs of individual tree soldiers were surely embedded in the stories, they are inextricable from the guiding hand of CCC officials. Rather than read these letters as a narrative of enrollee obsession with weight and body building, we must read them as evidence of an organizational obsession with those body projects. Weight gain was referenced over and over in CCC tree soldiers’ letters.

In a set of December 1935 letters from a central Pennsylvania camp named Stone Creek Kettle, men testified to their improved bodies. Herbert Walker wrote that “the diet we received has increased my weight 27 pounds.” Dale Lohman wrote that he “only weighted 135 when I came here – now 148 pounds.” William Howry “picked up” twenty pounds at a North Dakota camp,

54 L. J. Reader Educational Adviser, Cass Lake, Minn, December 15 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, Entry 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 144 and John Curry gained thirty-three pounds at a South Carolina camp.55 Other men focused on their musculature. In addition to gaining twenty-five pounds, enrollee Paul A. Crouch explained that after a year-and-a-half in the Corps he had “ceased to be the weakling that I was before enlistment. My muscles are harder, and in general ‘I can take it.’”56

Men regularly described a transition from being a “weakling” to becoming a strong man.

One explained that “when I left home…I was 6ft and wade a hundred fiftey pound … I look like a banana with a pair of felt boots on.” Another praised the camp food for changing him “from a skeleton-like person to a healthy looking youth.”57 Another wrote that “at enlistment I was what most people would call a bag of bones.” The young man, according to the gain narrative of his letter, quickly put seven pounds on those bones.58 Another said that when he entered the Corps he “was pretty much a weakling.” After his time in the Corps, though, he said he “can truthfully say that I am able to keep up.59 One CCC man described his previous body as that of “a drug store cow-boy.” Now, though, he was fit.60In letter after letter, individual tree soldiers recounted their physical transformations as one of the primary benefits of Corps enrollment.

Physical benefits like weight and muscle gain were second only to economic benefits in the letters of the Corps men. These concerns – those of money and of strength – were intertwined. Building men meant building financial independence. One often-discussed concern about financial independence was ensuring young men had the strength and stamina for long

55 William Howry, CCC Benefit Letter, Mohall, North Dakota, 11 December 1935.; John R. Curry, CCC Benefit Letter, Greer, South Carolina, 3 December 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 56 Paul A. Crouch to H.R. Halsey, CCC Benefit Letter, Greer, South Carolina, 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 57 Bebe Pagleym CCC Benefit Letter, Somerset, PA, 17 Dec. 17 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 58 James Weister, CCC Benefit Letter, n.p., Dec. 1935? , NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 59 Dean Neelens to District Headquarters, Indianola, Iowa, 31 Dec. 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 60 Paul A. Crouch to H.R. Halsey, CCC Benefit Letter, Greer, South Carolina, 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 145 hours of physical labor. Only through strong bodies could men attain the title of breadwinner.

The importance of the “breadwinner” role to building manhood was usually symbolic, but it could also be quite literal. One tree soldier beamed with pride at actually being able to feed his family through his labor. The Corps man explained that not only had he build up his own body, gaining twelve pounds while at his camp, but the money he sent home allowed his entire family to gain weight.61 The economic and physical goals of the Corps were tightly intertwined.

This was reiterated by the reports written by educational directors of the camps, and included with some benefit letters. Like that North Carolina director who wrote on behalf of his men, most of these formal replacements of or accompaniments to benefit letters focused on the economic and physical gain of enrollees. One explained that “of forty two members whose weights were checked, only two showed any loss of weight.” These enrollees were identified.

Also identified, though this time for praise, were the men who gained the most weight. “The largest individual gains in the group were made by Members Garland Core and Thomas

Stanley,” the director wrote, “both of whom gained twenty five pounds during the year in which they were here.” Another man who arrived underweight gained twenty five pounds, became a talented boxer, and then left the Corps for the Army. Two other men were lauded for gaining large amounts in just three months at the camp. He went on to calculate averages divided by length of stay. Although he admitted his calculations were “not a scientific experiment,” he still proudly produced his research, which showed an average of ten pounds gained per man per year.

From this, the education director drew some broad conclusions. First, he explained that among hardworking men, “this gain in weight is indicative of better health and runs hand in hand with increased strength.” Echoing the conflation of weight with health in the 1910s and 1920s, the

61 Henry Casanta, Logantown PA, Benefit Letter, 1935?, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 146 director used weight gain statistics to demonstrate that “a boy makes a change for the better by serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps.”62

Figure 5: Happy Days, April 1934.

One cartoon from a 1933 issue of Happy Days illustrates the difference between the publicity of the Corps about male transformation, and the sometimes disappointing reality of

62 Robert B. Hawkins to Corps Area Education Adviser, “Physical Benefits to Members at Large,” Bryson City, North Carolina, 7 Dec. 1935, NARA II, College Park, MD, RG 35, E 99 Division of Planning and Public Relations Benefit Letters. 147 those transformations.63 The first three cells of the cartoon tell a CCC story that could be right out of one of Fechner’s brochures. First, a young Peavie named Pete writes home. “Dear dad,” his letter begins. “Boy is this a swell place! Have gained a lot – coming home on work leave, will be there tomorrow.” In the second cell, Pete’s father interprets the comment about his son’s

“gain” as he has been trained to by Corps publicity. The father takes the reference to his son having “gained a lot” to immediately mean weight gain, the most publicized of all gains a man might make in the CCC. The thought bubble above the father’s head fills with an image of a brawny, muscular man, the head of his head on the body of a Corps Adonis. His proud chest outward, the father smiles ever so slightly: the scrawny boy he sent away now had the physique of a man. In cell three, the boy, clad in a large overcoat, greets his father with a handshake.

Pete enters, and the father immediately sizes up Pete and exclaims: “Gosh son youve really filled out.” “Yep,” Pete agrees. In cartoon cell four, however, the story takes a turn. Pete removes his bulky overcoat and reveals his body. Pete, it turns out, is an embarrassing “almost

110 pounds.” His father falls to the floor with a big “PLOP!” The CCC had not made Pete the man his father imagined, or the man Corps publicity promised. The cartoon, with its emphasis on camp rhetoric and enrollee letters, reiterates how critical the discussion of the male body was to camp directors. It also reminds of how that language shaped the language used by enrolled men to discuss their participation in the program. Even when it did not reflect the reality of their time in the programs, the cartoon suggests, men in the Corps understood their participation to so directly be about their weight and growth, they had so internalized that idea that the reality of their growth hardly mattered. In this we see both some of the limits of the directive state.

Certainly not every body would grow under the feeding and care of the Corps’ program. Physical bodies, metabolisms, and hormones are all different. In notable ways, then, it is the advisory

63 Joe Campbell, Happy Days, vo1. 2 no. ? (April 21 1934), 9. NARA II RG 35, E 18 Happy Days, Box 1. 148 message of the Corps which most shines through. As it altered the imaginations of Corps men at least as much as their actual bodies, the advisory components of the CCC may have been even more meaningful than the directive components of the program.

Conclusion

“After two years in the Civilian Conservation Corps I have learned to take care of my body,” wrote enrollee Victor Pesek.64 Another enrollee recounted how he observed “the weak and sickly shirker develop physically.”65 The Corps not only made men stronger, it also made them better workers and shut down any tendency toward “shirking.” The successes of the Corps were discussed often, and it became one of the most popular programs of the New Deal.

Building on the advisory body projects of agencies that came before, the CCC used the unique economic and political circumstances of the New Deal to implement a directive body project. The Corps housed, fed, clothed, paid, and supervised men in camps. In the CCC’s body- shaping project, there was no clear distinction between interventions to improve young men’s job prospects, young men’s behavior and morality, and young men’s bodies. Yet altered bodies were not simply incidental, they were not a side-effect of providing men with ample food and demanding physical labor. Rather, the muscular form which many CCC bodies took on was a directive at the center of the Corps’ aims.

The Corps was also an advisory agency. The Civilian Conservation Corps photographed, wrote about, discussed, and otherwise heavily publicized the bodies of male enrollees. A young, white, muscular body at work came to symbolize the social and economics possibilities of a post-

64 Victor Pesek of Lewiston, Idaho, “An Inventory of Character,” in This New America: The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ed. Alfred C. Oliver, Jr. and Harold M. Dudley (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1937), 106. 65 John Miller, “Self-Respect and Self-Reliance,” in This New America: The Spirit of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ed. Alfred C. Oliver, Jr. and Harold M. Dudley (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1937), 107. 149

Depression nation. Corps publicity thus emphasized connections between one’s muscles and one’s ability to provide for a family. As the leadership prepared materials promoting the Corps, they also promoted the physique as a model for all American men. In the case of the CCC, the directive and advisory projects of the agency complimented one another. As the Corps produced more and more material linking muscles and economic success, it suggested all American men needed building…which it could provide.

Once the United States entered World War II, however, a congressional committee met to discuss terminating the Corps. “The time for frills in Government passed on December 7, last,” one man told the committee. On the other side, an administrator from the National Security

Agency argued that the Corps could be adapted for a wartime context. Men in the CCC, he argued, learned discipline, work habits, and hygiene. The camps also “provide[d] an excellent rehabilitation service in preparing men for the Army. Numerous selective service rejectees,” he explained, “are physically fit for service in the Civilian Conservation Corps. With proper diet, regular habits, and incidental corrective treatment large numbers of them are enabled to overcome their physical deficiencies and are made available for military service.”66 Those who understood the Corps as primarily a social welfare or employment agency believed that the CCC was no longer needed. Those, including the Corps administration itself, who conceptualized the

CCC as a broader program of “building men” up physically and socially saw a continued need for the Corps. In the end, as the war intensified, the former group won. Still, a large contingent understood the CCC as a critical man building program, even worthy of co-existing with the more man-building program of an Army going to war.

66 F.H. Lawson, Senate hearing, “Termination of the C.C.C. and N.Y.A.,” March 1942, 251; Transcript, “Conversation with J. S. Billips, Special Investigator,” National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Entry 21, Records Relating to the Proposed Merger of the National Youth Administration and the CCC, Box 3, Folder: Notes of Conversations or Conferences. 150

Although the CCC did not last beyond the war, it set a precedent for some more directive and advisory programming focused on the young male body amid national emergency. In directive terms, the Corps’ ability to shape the bodies of its enrollees provided a model for some of the physical rehabilitation plans made for men who did not live up to World War II recruitment. The Corps also presented a new model for what a patriotic, masculine, white

American body ought to look like, and how one could get that body through a combination of federal aid and individual initiative. The Corps sold a muscular image of American masculinity and tied it to independence and citizenship. For select men, the CCC offered a hand in meeting the Corps’ imagination of the breadwinning male body. For all men, the Corps advised the development of a muscular, weight-gain based, and labor intensive American masculinity. 151

Chapter 5

Big Men, Big Government? The Selective Service and Physical Standards, 1940-1948

The first issue of Captain America, published in 1941, featured a thin, weak young man

named Steve Rogers. Ashamed of his physique, he held his head in his hand as authority figures

surveyed his body. One of these men, a military scientist who planned to subject Rogers’ wiry-

frame to a secret experiment,

provides narration. “Observe this

young man closely…Today he

volunteered for Army service,

and was refused because of his

unfit condition! His chance to

serve his country seemed gone!”

Rogers failed the US Army’s

physical examination,

presumably owing to his weight

or musculature. The military

scientist narrating aimed to repair

this failed body. In doing so, he

repaired the failed masculinity of

young Rogers, whose inability to

serve suggested he was an

inadequate man, a failed “citizen- Figure 1: Captain America 152 soldier.” The scientist injected Rogers with a strengthening serum. This treatment succeeded.

“He’s changing!” an observing bureaucrat exclaimed. Change he did. The serum transformed the scrawny Rogers into a super-human figure, twice his original size and all muscle.

The scientist dubbed the changed man “Captain America.” This was a reincarnation of the masculine physique touted in Civilian Conservation Corps brochures and posters. The scrawny boy transformed into the muscular young man, into a body worthy of citizenship.1 The

Corps man had volunteered to be rebuilt through months of laboring, calisthenics, feedings, and weigh-ins. By the 1940s, with the US at war, the time to reshape men was over. Instead, drawing on decades of work developing physical standards across government, the onset of World War II and the mass mobilization of the nation became a moment for the mass assessment and classification of American men. Height-weight standards were nothing new, and had been popular with mothers, federal agencies dedicated to health or children, and, indeed, the military, for decades. Yet the Selective Service during World War II made height, weight, and other quantitative physical assessments more urgent than they had been at any point previously.

The draft quickly brought thousands of men through what James Sparrow describes as

“three bureaucratic gates” which a man had to pass on his way to war. First, men went to their local examining boards. Later, they went to federal induction stations. Finally, men attended boot camp.2 Each interaction with the state came with examination and assessment of the man’s physical and psychological health, as well as his morals. The two sites at which examiners extensively used weight and height standards were the local examining boards and the induction stations. As a result, those are the two bureaucratic gates we must consider when trying to

1 Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity During World War II (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois, 2004), 4-5. 2 Sparrow, Warfare State, 2011, 204. 153 understand how directive body projects were possible under the World War II state, and how body projects remained advisory otherwise.

To manage the sheer number of bodies to be examined – nineteen million in about six years’ time – the Selective Service relied on measurements and standards to assess potential soldiers and support staff. Lieutenant General Leonard D. Heaton, Surgeon General of the Army in the 1960s, looked back approvingly at the growth of standards in the World War II era. “There is no subject more immediately pertinent for military planning than physical standards,” he explained. In the 1940s, the Selective Service System needed a quick way of “classifying and easily describing physical capacities of individuals.”3 Heaton in fact found the WWII standards useful enough that he recommended them as a model for physical standards of the 1960s.

In the process of setting new military physical standards for American men, the Selective

Service took on the role of a directive agency. American women would be expected to submit to the good of the whole over the good of the individual through pseudo-voluntary means, ranging from cooking without butter to working on the war assembly line to joining the Women’s Army

Corps or the WAVES.4 This was consistent with what American women had been asked to do with other state projects. What was different was that now every adult man would be touched by draft, induction, and examination. Every man’s height, weight, and musculature became critical clues to what that man’s wartime role would entail. Each of the nineteen thousand men examined felt the arm of the state as they stood naked on the scale of a local board’s station, and as they

3 Leonard D. Heaton, Foreword in Physical Standards in World War II, Medical Department, United States Army, ed. Col. Robert S. Anderson (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), ix. 4 WAVES stands for “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service,” but the full name was seldom used. These were female Navy reservists allowed to serve in a non-combat capacity for the duration of the war emergency, and no longer. For discussions of women’s military and civilian sacrifices in WWII, see Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during WWII (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); Ruth Milkman, The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During WWII (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1987); and Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps in WWII (New York: Columbia, 1996). 154 received their new identity as a classified man, a man whose value was boiled down into a roman numeral and a single capital letter. In the process of drafting, inducting, examining, and classifying, the role of the state became directive in a way that had never before seemed possible with a body project. I consider the role of the Selective Service System during and after the war to understand the directive work of this agency.

At the same time, as the directive state became prominent in these intimate matters, the limits of this arrangement also came to the fore. As the Selective Service System’s nearly

200,000 voluntary workers enforced physical standards, the application of standards proved uneven and messy. Even against the backdrop of a nation at war, local volunteers refused to march in lock-step with the federal Selective Service aims. The height-weight tables meant to seem objective and scientific were regularly exposed as subjective assessments. Even federal standards could not completely erase how each had a slightly different idea of the physique and weight of the war-ready American man.

Mobilizing Men

The World War II body project entailed the induction of about ten million American men between 1940 and 1947. To get those ten million acceptable recruits, the nation would need to sort its Steve Rogers from its Captain Americas. Forty-five million American men registered for the draft, essentially making their presence as a male citizen visible in the eyes of a militarizing state. Of those men, about nineteen million were called up, and subjected to physical, mental, and moral examination. About half of the men passed, and about half of the men failed these examinations.5 This culling process was directive state work, with the active examination and

5 James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford, 2001), 204. 155 assessment of American men transformed into a mandatory component of male citizenship through the draft. It was under those circumstances that the World War II draft was developed as a directive body project in a society of mostly advisory federal body projects.

Figures 2 and 3: left, Col. Leonard Rowntree. Right, Gen. Lewis B. Hershey

To fully mobilize the nation for World War II, the military needed huge numbers of soldiers. While some men joined voluntarily – especially just after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor – young male troops were in such demand that voluntary enlistment could not meet Army needs. The Selective Service and Training Act of September 1940 was issued as the first peacetime draft in United States history.6 The Selective Service System was headed by

General Lewis B. Hershey, a former Army captain who complained regularly about the “half men” of the nation.7 Hershey brought Dr. Leonard G. Rowntree on board to head the medical division of the Selective Service System. Rowntree’s background was as a medical researcher,

6 Keith E. Eiler, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell, 1997). 7 George Q. Flynn, Lewis B. Hershey: Mr. Selective Service (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985). 156 with a special focus on kidney disease. He spent over a decade at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and then spent most of the 1930s as Director of the Philadelphia Institute of Medical Research.

The Canadian-born Rowntree’s duty as chief of the medical division was to manage the work of

17,000 doctors around the country, almost all volunteers, as they conducted examinations of inductees.8 Rowntree thus was responsible for height-weight standards and other classifications.

Nearly 70,000 men were wholly rejected during World War II – assigned IV-F status – explicitly owing to their weights. These 70,000 men rejected on the basis of weight were a small proportion of the young men examined at local draft boards, making up only about two percent of rejectees. Despite the prevalence of so many statistically greater causes of rejection, like mental illness and venereal disease, physical “underdevelopment” garnered a disproportionate amount of media interest. When one committee of the Federal Security Agency discussed

American fitness during the war, they explained that, in order of importance, mental disease, mental deficiency, musculoskeletal defects, syphilis, and heart problems were the primary causes of draftee rejection. The Federal Security Agency then went on to explain that many of these rejections “could have been prevented or cured if the community had been aware of the importance of physical fitness.”9

“Physical unfitness,” referring most commonly to weight, strength, musculature and stamina, became the primary term employed to discuss the shortcomings of American young men. Despite the measly two percent of rejections attribute directly to weight, the popular discussion of rejections focused heavily on weight, strength, and musculature as causes of

American military weakness. Physical unfitness was easy to picture and explain in ways that the

8 Penelope Johnston, “Dr. Leonard Rowntree: A Canadian Medical Pioneer,” Medical Post 36, no. 2 (January 2000): 45. 9 RG 147 Records of the Selective Service System,1940-, Entry 45, Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations 1942-1946, Box 1329, Folder Physical Education, General, January – August 1944, Proceedings of the Planning Conference of the AMA and National Committee on Physical Fitness, 27 and 28 July 1944. 157 far more common rejections for mental illness were not. It was relatable. Physical fitness also seemed vaguely in control of citizens, and maybe even in the control of the State. Syphilis was a common cause of Army rejection and a fixable problem, but it did require medical intervention.

Moreover, as the number one cause of black men’s rejection from the services, syphilis was an uncomfortable topic. Weight and strength, however, were seemingly within the realm of the individual, and should be quickly and freely fixed.

Monitoring weight, height, and musculature served a related gender-policing agenda.

Army psychology suggested that sexual deviance would be inscribed on the body. First, soldier bodies were assumed to be male. While women actually served a number of roles in the war, including as soldiers, soldiering was considered male work.10 Second, these male soldiers were also assumed to be masculine, in a fashion which explicitly excluded the military service of men deemed homosexual or otherwise sexually deviant. While some histories suggest wartime allowed unusual freedoms for gay identities and behaviors, this situation did not apply to the draft, induction, or examination process. In fact, Allan Berube argues that examination boards medicalized homosexuality to an unprecedented degree with the replacement of “degeneracy” language with the psychoanalytical language of homosexual identity. Board psychologists categorized homosexuality as sexual psychopathy, and a danger to other men in the service.11

Less than their actual sexual behavior, an obsession with policing “sissies,” and purging the service of effeminacy and gender deviance, seems to have been at the center of Selective Service concerns. Men with “broad hips,” pubic fat, or a “scant and downy beard” exhibited physical signs of failed masculinity.12 Weight examinations would similarly mark the below-standard man

10 Meyer, Creating GI Jane, 1996, 7-8. 11 Allan Berrube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Plume, 1990), 14-15. 12 Berrube, Coming Out Under Fire, 1990, 13-14. 158 as frail and effeminate. A sub-par weight and musculature was easily conflated with a sub-par masculine vigor, as Steve Rogers’ story suggests.

Increasingly, the over-standard weight was also associated with failed masculinity. The overweight boy would be seen as doughy, “soft,” and not a full man.13 As the defined musculature of Civilian Conservation Corps poster-boys showed, the range of possibilities for the American male body narrowed in the 1930s and 1940s. Examination board height-weight standards promised an objective take on the situation - they could weed out shoddy male specimens with the scales and charts. The widespread physical examinations initiated by the draft meant most American men would interact with that unforgiving system of measurement.

The Measured Man

An elaborate system of World War II physical exams sprung up almost overnight, and were soon organized under the leadership of medical division chief Leonard Rowntree. The

Surgeon General’s manual on Mobilization Regulations, “Standards of Physical Examination during Mobilization,” was issued less than a month prior to the issuance of the Selective Service

Act, and the six-thousand local boards around the nation rushed to learn their new equipment, forms, and examination procedures. Governors from each state, at the behest of the Selective

Service System, called on privately employed doctors, dentists, and in large enough areas psychologists, to conduct the medical portion of exams in accordance with Selective Service standards.14

13 “Is American Youth Physically Soft?” US News and World Report, (August 2nd 1957): 74-77, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 9. 14 Medical Department, Physical Standards in WWII, 1967, 3. 159

Figure 4: Standards relating to height, weight, and chest measurement. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, E NM-32 50B, Box 4 Vol 1, 196.

Put simply, physicians and a few other local board members (such as those who might assess the familial or employment status of the draftee) were to use procedures and standards to classify a man. A man would be named class I, II, III, or IV, and a letter between A and F, based on social, political, and physical concerns. The most famous rankings are I-A (fit for duty), I-B

(fit for limited duty), IV-F (completely unfit for service), and IV-E (conscientious objector). A

IV-E or IV-F classification was not simply a marker stating that a man would not serve. It was also evidence of his failed masculinity. A conscientious objector was a “sissy,” a man who would not protect his nation. A classification of IV-F, though, may have dealt an even bigger blow. There was no moral, ethical, or religious reason for a IV-F classification, nothing that a man could try to take back and make his own. The IV-F, instead, was a marker of a man’s failure that might be attached to him for life.

The process of getting assigned to these categories took several steps. First, men went to local boards for a physical examination. Second, they went to a national-level board, usually called an induction board. Men who volunteered for the services early in the war would have a casual exam before heading to the induction station. As the call to arms became steadier, this 160 bureaucratic infrastructure grew exponentially. This was especially true when it came to managing draftees. In compliance with the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, adult men filled out draft cards and were assigned draft numbers. When called to service, men reported to their local board.

Figure 5: A doctor, working voluntarily and temporarily for the Army, conducts a physical exam on an eighteen-year-old boy in San Augustine, Texas. April 1943.Library of Congress, LC- USW3-025297-D.

161

Local examinations could prove to be complicated affairs. Army medical standards offered detailed guidelines as to how physicians were to measure potential soldiers. Measuring height in particular required extensive instruction and a moderate amount of equipment.

Examiners were to use “a board at least 2 inches wide by 80 inches long, placed vertically.” The manual then explained how “The registrant should stand erect with his back to the graduated board, eyes straight to the front.”15 The potential soldier was to be completely undressed for the weighing. The scale did not need to be a specific model, but it did need to be “known to be accurate.”16 The examination process was designed to ensure national uniformity in such an enormous examination process that Army doctors and facilities alone could not handle it.

From these measurements and a series of other tests, the doctor would assess the man’s fitness for service. The men must be free of obvious diseases and have a somewhat normal, but not perfect, physique. In practice, however, both the examination process and the classification of draftees proved far more complicated. With almost 6,500 local boards across the country, manned by nearly 30,000 (mainly civilian) physicians, it was difficult to ensure uniform local exams.17

In cases where local board physicians could not decide on a particular draftee’s physical condition they could send him to a special Medical Advisory Board where a specialist would assess him. There were over six-hundred-fifty specialized Medical Advisory Boards in action during WWII. Those boards focused on areas like eyes, ears, nose and throat, orthopedics, and

15 Medical Department, United States Army, Physical Standards in World War II, ed. Col. Robert S. Anderson, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1967), 132. 16 Medical Department, Physical Standards in World War II, 1967, 132. 17 RG 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, NM Entry43 Box, 625, vol. 3, Special Problems of the Selective Service System, 205. 162 psychology.18 Trips to a Medical Advisory Board would be paid for entirely by the Army and could take up to three days.

Figure 6: Swedish-American selectee in Minnesota taking a physical examination as he is inducted into the US Army. LC-USW3-001082-D. April 1942

Once a man was approved by the local or medical advisory board, he was then sent to induction boards, where the examination process was essentially replicated by Army Medical

Officers. These were larger facilities with standardized, modern equipment that not every local board had access to. Men accepted at local boards could still be rejected when they reached

18 RG 165, NM Entry 43 Box 625, vol. 3, Special Problems of the Selective Service System, 208. 163

Army induction stations, although the standards were technically the same as those used by local boards. If the induction board also accepted the man, then he would be sent off to boot camp.

Both the local boards and the induction stations compared men’s weights and heights to

Army charts. The overweight and underweight were both at risk of rejection. These charts provided two tiered categories of acceptance and rejection. The first was an absolute minimum standard. Men shorter than 5’, taller than 6’5, or lighter than 105 pounds were to be immediately rejected with an IV-F classification.19 Assuming a man passed those cut-offs, he would be compared to the chart. The man would then be expected to meet either “minimum” or “standard” measurements.20 The minimum goals were harder to meet than the absolute rejection cut-offs.

The standard goals were even more difficult to meet than that. A man who was 5’10, for instance, would need to weigh at least 105 pounds to avoid IV-F status. To meet minimum goals, he was to weigh at least 133 pounds. The standard weight for a man of this height according to the Army tables was about 152 pounds.21 At less than 105 pounds he should be rejected.

Between 105 and 132 pounds he would be rejected during peacetime, but might be accepted when reserves were low. Between 133 and 152 pounds the man would most likely be accepted conditionally, perhaps with the understanding he needed physical rehabilitation before he could serve. Amid national emergency he would be accepted without any caveats. Excluding the 105 pound cut-off, however, the determination of what to do with someone moderately underweight was largely left up to the examining board.

19 Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 1, Vol. 1. 20 Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 1, Vol. 1. 21 Analysis of Results of Physical Examination, 196, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry NM-32 50B, Box 4, Vol. 1. 164

When draftees weighed less than 105 pounds, their admission was explicitly forbidden.

This meant than 35-year-old Jiddle Jaffe was rejected by a Tennessee local board for weighing

102 pounds. The same board rejected 29-year-old William Jordan, who weighed 104 pounds.22

“Underweight” was the reason listed for their IV-F classifications. At least two men from

Baltimore City, who weighed in at three pounds underweight, were sent through a costly rehabilitation program before they were allowed to serve. Lawrence A. Miller spent thirty days in such a program after he was measured at five pounds underweight.23 Such treatment, according to Selective Service Director Hershey, could cost up to sixty dollars (about $800 today) per man. The Selective Service paid one-third of the cost for that rehabilitation.24 Any of these men might, of course, have been extraordinarily underweight, or perhaps weak or seemingly malnourished. Without more information recorded, like the men’s heights or vitals, it is impossible to judge the severity of the “underweight” label. We can see, though, that these local boards aimed to adhere to federal standards with the utmost care, fiercely respecting

Selective Service guidelines all the way down to the pound.

Army medical examiner complained of a ridiculous adherence to standards and bloating of military bureaucracy in the service’s search “for the ‘perfect man.’” A better way to approach standards, the army Major explained, was to just look for men who generally seemed like they

22 Robert H. Owens to Col. Leonard G. Rowntree, 8 June 1942, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 467, Folder Physical Rehabilitation N.H.-Ore 1942. 23 “Report of Rehabilitation Cases Now in Operation Which Should be Completed by May 15 1942,” National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Subject 1940, Box 466, Folder 604, Physical Rehabilitation, Gen’l, May-Dec. 1942. 24 Lewis Hershey to State Directors of Maryland and Virginia, 21 Jan. 1942, p. 4., National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 466, Folder 604, Physical Rehabilitation Gen’l – Jan-Apr 1942. 165 could probably handle service – no fancy examinations or standards required.25 One Colonel evaluating the examination procedure accepted federal standards, but thought they should be taken as guidelines rather than rules. Rather than reject all those men who were just three pounds under minimum, Col. Bennett G. Owens thought most examiners should break the rules to approve men weighing as little as a hundred pounds on the assumption the men could gain five pounds by induction.26 On the other hand, he believed rules needed to be stated more clearly on the Selective Service forms, since quite a few men under 105 pounds were making it to induction stations. Owens seems to have thrown out the subjective height-weight standards entirely in favor of the simple bare minimum rule, a rule that he already found too strict. A year into World

War II, Owens’ choice to emphasize the bare minimum weight for rejection rather than the open- to-interpretation height-weight standards became the normal rather than exceptional approach.

By late 1942, even the Medical Director for the Selective Service backed down from the published standards. He explained that “in view of the urgent need of manpower, mild degrees of underweight carry less significance than in the past…. Unless the underweight is very marked, a large proportion of individuals will probably be accepted by the army.”27 He included this explanation in a two-way correspondence with a Hawaiian Selective Service representative, not as part of a public announcement. It was, moreover, not accompanied by any official reworking of standards. The standards remained the same.

25 Maj. Lawrence W. Long to Gen. Hershey, 9 Jan. 1942, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 466, Folder 604, Physical Rehabilitation, MD – Nevada 1942. 26 Lt. Col. Bennett G. Owens to Col. Eans, 23 Nov. 1942, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 471, Folder 616, Misc. Defects, General, 1942. 27 L. G. Rowntree to Col. Clarence E. Fronk, 12 Dec. 1942, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 466, Folder 604, Physical Rehabilitation, Ala. – Maine 1942. 166

Contesting Weight

While standards were designed to allow for uniform, objective judgments across the nation, they more realistically provided examiners with the tools of judgment, and the authority to make their own decisions on behalf of the state. Height-weight standards were not uniformly applied, and were treated with different levels of concern in different venues. This uneven application of standards provides a lens through which we can examine some of the tensions between a growing federal bureaucracy and the local officials throughout the country charged with assisting it. Numerical standards seemed to offer a straightforward, uniform method of assessing potential soldiers. The standards would fulfill federal interests across an enormous, unwieldy nation, and keep local administration in check. Standards, though, could not erase the importance of individual administrators and local boards, or what one irritated Adjutant General called the “personality factors” of examinations.28 Moreover, a subjective assessment of these bodily measurements was beyond the control of federal officials. As several historians have shown in the context of marriage law and New Deal policy, laws as they existed on the books could be quite different from the law as applied by local bureaucrats.29

Raymond Hackney was already preoccupied with the idea of joining the US Navy when he heard the news of war in Europe. Although he had been rejected from the Navy a couple years earlier for being underweight, Hackney was eager to try again. He was, at 113 pounds, still seven pounds under the service’s desired weight of 120 pounds. A high ranking

28 Major, Adjutant General James L. Glymph to the Adjutant General, 10 December 1948, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 337, Records of Headquarters Army Ground Forces, Entry 56, Army Field Forces, Box 39, File: 201.5/1. Glymph is specifically discussing the problem of civilians conducting examinations for Post-War ROTC recruits, which is of course a different issue, but the parallels are striking enough that his description of the problem still applies. 29 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford, 2009), 133-4; Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2002); Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2002), Edward G. Goetz, New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Ithaca: Cornell, 2013); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Oxford, 2013). 167

Navy man told Hackney to try again, but only after eating seven pounds of bananas and topping it off with as much water as he could drink. Hackney listened to the advice, and soon returned with a bellyful of bananas. “I weighed in at 120.2,” he recounted.30 Hackney joined the Navy.

As former Surgeon General of the Army Heaton looked back at his experiences with

WWII Army standards, he explained that “there is an inescapable factor of judgment” in the measurement process. This judgment was “exercised first by those who prepare the standards and second by those who apply the norm to the individual case.”31 The Army system of local and induction examination was built around height-weight standards, and the enforcement of those numbers could be directive. Since evaluating those numbers was ultimately put in human hands, though, directive activity still had limits.

Local boards and induction examiners were regularly at odds. Harry F. Besoda, for instance, who had been directing local examination efforts in Puerto Rico, wrote to the Selective

Service System about his confusion over the absolute height and weight cut-offs. He asked whether a man must be rejected simply because he was under five-feet or weighed less than 105 pounds, or if the man must meet both criterions to be classed as 4-F.32 Local boards also may have misreported statistics, especially for draftee height. Selective Service statisticians determining the average heights and weights of enlisted men explained that their numbers skewed low due to bad record keeping. Some boards, they explained, wrote that 5’ 6 men were

56 inches tall. The statisticians determined that they would try to correct these errors in the

30 Raymond H. Hackney, “One Man’s Story from World War II,” The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA, July 4 1995): A14. 31 Heaton, “Foreward,” in Physical Standards in World War II, 1967, ix. 32 Harry F. Besoda to Col. Carlton S, Dargusch, 14 July 1944, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 1306, Folder 346.2 Physically Unfit Neb. – Wyo. 1944; Carlton S. Dargusch to Hayy F. Besoda, 27 July 1944, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 1306, Folder 346.2 Physically Unfit Neb. – Wyo. 1944. 168 statistics for accepted men (based on the premise that men under 60” tall were not to have been accepted). They could not, however, make such assumptions with rejected men, and instead just generally distrusted the recorded measurements for those men.33

Local boards also did not always understand that height-weight measurements were not a formality for the Selective Service, but were in fact a central element of assessing men’s preparation for the Army. Some boards did not simply misreport the data but skipped recording it altogether. In 1941, up until Pearl Harbor, local boards left off applicants’ weights on almost

4700 forms, and the height blank on nearly 4600 (almost certainly overlapping) forms.34 There is evidence that this was especially an issue when it came to assessing men who might qualify as

“overweight.” Vague federal guidelines stated how overweight men could be accepted as long as their bodies were (subjectively) proportionate and as long as these men could still train. This baffled some local examiners, perhaps because it was subjective in a sphere obsessed with objectivity, or perhaps because it called on local boards to interpret overweight as a health problem when that was usually reserved for underweight.

In 1940, Edward A. Beckwith, South Dakota’s Director of Selective Service, turned to the National Selective Service to help guide him through the confusing terrain of determining how much weight was really too much. With no explicit cap as to the amount an overweight man could weigh while still being acceptable for deferred or limited service, Beckwith was unsure what to do with a 230 pound enlistee. At about five-feet-eleven-inches, the man weighed almost twenty pounds above an appropriate weight for his height. And yet, Beckwith explained, the

33 National Headquarters, Selective Service System, Causes of Rejection and Incidence of Defects: Local Board Examinations of Selective Service Registrants in Peacetime, Medical Statistic Bulletin No.2, 1943, p. 15, fn. 2., National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 880, Folder: Medical Circulars, General 1943. 34 National Headquarters, Selective Service System, Causes of Rejection and Incidence of Defects: Local Board Examinations of Selective Service Registrants in Peacetime, Medical Statistic Bulletin No.2, 1943, p. 38-9. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 880, Folder: Medical Circulars, General 1943. 169 guidelines for rejection owing to overweight were only “vaguely stated.”35 After all, at many boards men far below their “appropriate weights” were still accepted without pause so long as they were above 105 pounds; why would boards pay attention to height-weight ideals for the overweight when they often ignored them with the underweight? Robert A. Bier, Captain of the

Medical Division of the Selective Service, responded with even more confusingly subjective guidelines: so long as “the weight is fairly well distributed over his entire frame,” this case of overweight should not prevent the enlistee’s acceptance.36 In this instance then, even a request to the standards-setters to provide a more uniform regulation only elicited further complications.

Now local judges had to guess at whether an unacceptable weight was actually a rejectable weight based not only on numbers but on how the weight sat upon the body.

Men might be accepted by a local board despite some defect, and then rejected once they reached the induction boards at Army bases. When the standards were first put in place, enough physically unfit men were still sent ahead by local boards that Selective Service medical officers began to complain. When some of the acceptances proved particularly unreasonable by SSS standards, the federal agency expressed a mix of concern and irritation that the local “physicians did not comprehend the physical standards” or were conducting inadequate examinations.37 In

Pennsylvania, as one example, fifteen percent of the men whom local board physicians found acceptable went on to rejections from induction board examiners – examiners who were theoretically conducting the same exam and using the same standards tables.38

35 Edward A. Beckwith to Robert A. Bier, 18 Dec. 1940, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 37, Folder: 330. Physical Standards. Ala to Wyo. 36 Robert A. Bier to Edward A, Beckwith, 26 Dec. 1940, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 37, Folder: 330. Physical Standards. Ala to Wyo. 37 Special Problems of the System, 207, RG 165, NM Entry 43, Box 625, Vol. 3, NARA II, College Park, MD. 38 Special Problems of the System, 210, RG 165, NM Entry 43, Box 625, Vol. 3, NARA II, College Park, MD. 170

Figure 7: National Archives II, RG 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staff, NM entry #43, Box 625, Vol. 3, 194. Federal induction stations often took what was recorded as “weight deviance” more seriously than local boards. A number of men still made it through local boards only to be rejected for their weight once they reached induction stations. About one and a half percent of all rejections made by January 1943 were attributed to men’s position outside of weight standards

(both under and overweight). This is a small percentage, of course, but it still represented a sizable number of men. Three percent of rejections made at the second step, the induction station, were attributed to concerns about a man’s weight.39 While weight was not a major cause of rejection for local board, it was of concern to the national board. The discrepancy in rejections owing to weight suggests that this aspect of the soldier’s body was more difficult to negotiate between stations.40 The promise of objective numbers and standards was less imposing.

39 Untitled, bound statistics, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations 1942-1946, Box 1, Volume 1. 40 Selective Service as the Tide of War Turns – Third Report of the Director of Selective Service, 1943-1944 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1945), 191-194, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 171

Neither the standardization of physique, nor the implementation of tables, nor the use of these standards to manage normative masculinity came as easily as the draft boards suggested.

Even with extensive resources, local and national boards could not agree on how strictly height- weight tables were to be used. Neighborhood examiners did not judge men the same way external examiners judged them. The quantified, scientific of these millions of young male bodies, the directive approach to citizen physique, was a project only conceivable under the circumstances of full mobilization. Even then, it would not be fully implemented.

Towards a Directive State?

The Selective Service project was a project of assessing and managing bodies. What to do about the failed bodies, the failed American masculinities, was another story. In these years toward the end of World War II and in the immediate post-war period, Americans from military, medical, and political positions encouraged projects that would prepare American men – and in particular their American bodies – for the next national crisis. Once the war ended and Selective

Service standards no longer mattered in most men’s lives, many programs moved move away from trying to fix weight and musculature and toward trying to fix a more general, often ambiguous, American weakness. As enforceable body standards became a less urgent discourse, the circumstances which made the unusually directive work of the World War II Selective

Service possible dissipated. Plans to intervene in American bodies would be most successful when they were applied in voluntary and educational ways – through advisory state techniques.

Anything more forceful was interpreted as a political threat in a moment of anti-Communist hysteria. The draft itself continued through the Korean War and the Vietnam War, which meant that the coercive project of measuring, assessing, and shaping the bodies of American men

165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Entry NM-43, Reports of the Admin, of the Selective Training, Box 625, Volume 3. 172 continued for another thirty years after V-Day. World War II practices normalized the relationship between the draft, physical examinations, and rejections, however. While broad questions about military fitness remained popular topics, the mass mobilization and examination processes of World War II would not be duplicated, nor would the examinations receive such attention.

As Americans began to prepare for post-war life, General Hershey opposed the return of this male body project to the advisory sector. He had been responsible for American men’s bodies for about five years, and had judged them wanting. The failure of men to meet minimum standards appeared to him evidence of objective failure. Hershey told the Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education that “a considerable part of our citizenry has not been developed, or trained, or conditioned to accept the basic responsibility for defending their country in war.” 41 He bemoaned Americans’ physical unfitness, explaining that he “cannot help but feel that our educational system … has neglected the most important side of the human beings which they profess to train.” While opponents of federal mandates about rehabilitation and fitness programs sometimes argued that directive, federal intervention into the individual body was anti-democratic, Hershey argued that such interventions were necessary to maintain democracy.42 “It is idle to talk of a democracy,” Hershey explained, “…unless these citizens, each and every one, are able…to carry their part. There is no justice, there is no fairness, there is no democracy when less than 9,000,000 of our citizens must carry the lead of 13,000,000 of our

41 Lewis Hershey, July 10 1944, quoted in: RG 147 Records of the Selective Service System,1940-, Entry 45, Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations 1942-1946, Box 1329 Folder Physical Education, General, January – August 1944, Meeting Minutes, enclosed in letter from Frank S. Lloyd to Gen. Rowntree,23 Aug. 1944 42 For the Selective Service debate over compulsory versus voluntary rehabilitation, see especially Samuel J. Kopetzky, Medical Bulletin no. 5, 30 June 1941, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 167, Folder 604 : Physical Rehabilitation, NYC-Wyo 1941; Col. Rowntree to Waldemar Kaempffert, 10 July 1942, includes undated mss. “Repairing Rejectees for Service,” National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 167, Folder 604 : Physical Rehabilitation, General, May-Dec 1942. 173 citizenry; and unless and until we are able to take such measures which will insure that the maximum of our citizens are…able to accept all the responsibilities of citizens, we can have democracy only in name.”43

Programs designed to rehabilitate men’s IV-F bodies after the war were tested in several cities and states during the late 1940s.44 Officials debated whether such programs should be made voluntary or mandatory for men with remediable defects, particularly while the nation was at war. Additionally, publicity over unfit men helped to spur a number of civilian physical fitness programs, the most extensive of which was run by the Federal Security Agency.45 These programs provided the grounding for the physical fitness campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.

Moreover, they linked the bodies of civilian men – and women working in industry – to the needs of the nation, and the work of maintaining one’s individual body to one’s civic duties.

Most attempted interventions in the post-war period were voluntary, and the educational channel once again proved a practical method of state entities trying to improve the citizen body without appearing to do so. WWII had drawn attention to the apparent unfitness of men aged 18-

24, the most desirable demographic for new soldiers. The Selective Service and other critics then quickly identified American high schools and universities as a site of both the problem and the

43 Hershey, July 10 1944, quoted in: RG 147 Records of the Selective Service System,1940-, Entry 45, Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations 1942-1946, Box 1329, Folder Physical Education, General, January – August 1944, Meeting Minutes, Enclosed in letter from Frank S. Lloyd to Rowntree,23 August 1944. This is typical Hershey rhetoric. It appears again, for instance, Proceedings of the Planning Conference of the AMA and National Committee on Physical Fitness, 27-28 July 1944, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 1329, Folder: Physical Fitness, General, Jan-Aug 1944. 44 L.G. Rowntree to Colonel Dargusch, 30 October 1941, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 167, Folder 604 : Physical Rehabilitation, General, Oct- Dec.1941; J.J. McEntee to L.G. Rowntree, 15 October 1941, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 167, Folder 604 : Physical Rehabilitation, General, Oct- Dec.1941; L.B. Hershey to president, 27 Oct. 1941, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 167, Folder 604 : Physical Rehabilitation, General, Oct-Dec.1941. 45 Hon. Samuel A. Weiss, Transcript of speech delivered 19 February 1945, “America’s Physical Fitness Failure,” Congressional Record, 79th Congress, 1st Session, p. 1. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 1733, Folder 605. 174 possible solution. One branch of the New York State Education Department declared physical fitness necessary “for the very existence of our Nation,” and explained that preventive physical fitness was necessary since the war proved American men are “careless about the follow-up and correction of remediable defects.”46

A few possibilities for mandatory physical training did emerge from these concerns. The most famous were plans for Universal Military Training (UMT).47 The revival of a post-WWI plan, post-WWII UMT was a plan to require all American young men to engage in basic military training. A large and well-trained army, officers hoped, could prevent future wars.48 Arguments for UMT, however, appear to have focused more on the need to train men for combat itself rather than the need to improve their physical fitness. A more limited plan, which did emphasize physical preparedness rather than training itself, focused on spreading examination and physical testing, with an effort to catch potential “defects” before young men (and in many plans, women) might be needed for service. Democratic Representative Samuel Weiss called for such mandatory physical exams for all kindergarten and school age children.49

In conjunction with Weiss’ plan, Representative Fred Hartley argued unsuccessfully for universal training “beginning at an early age.”50 His version of universal training was no UMT, and used a decentralized model in which schools would be responsible for managing compulsory

46 New York State Physical Fitness Standards for Boys and Young Men, A Manual For Instructors, NYS War Council, State Education Dept. 1944 (draft), p. 1.RG 147 Records of the Selective Service System,1940-, Entry 45, Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations 1942-1946 Box 1330 Folder 605 Physical Education Ala- Wyo 1944. 47 Universal Military Training, material prepared to supplement War Department testimony before Congress, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 319, Records of the Army Staff Assistant Chief of Staff, Entry G2, Intelligence Admin. Division, Publication Files, Box 3671, Folder: Universal Military Training. 48 Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941-45 (New Haven: Yale, 1977), 36-7. 49 Hon. Samuel A. Weiss, Transcript of speech delivered 19 February 1945, “America’s Physical Fitness Failure,” Congressional Record, 79th Congress, 1st session, p. 2. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 1733, Folder 605; Samuel J. Kopetzky, Medical Bulletin no. 5, 30 June 1941, 2, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 167, Folder 604 : Physical Rehabilitation, General, Jan-Sept.1941. 50 H. R. 2045, 79th Congress, 1st Session, 7 February 1945, 2. 175 physical training. It was designed primarily to design and fund state and local-level programming. The official plans did not include requirements for examination. Even with these limits, Weiss and Hartley found themselves in front of Congress explaining that their bill “does not set up a ‘Hitler youth movement’ idea.”51 The funding aspect of his failed proposal meant it would have had more teeth than most, but it still was ultimately a plan based on volunteerism and a belief that American citizens would agree to improve their bodies in the name of national security.

Conclusion

The WWII body project had entailed the induction of about ten million American men, and the examination and rejection of another ten million. As Hershey, Rowntree, and the

Selective Service System prepared a generation of soldiers, they used standards and quantification to create a directive body project. While we have seen standards used for advisory state work on the body before, in the case of the WWII-era Selective Service System standards made for a directive body project. Standards were actively used to assess, classify, qualify, and reject American men’s bodies. Against the pressure of international emergency and a Selective

Service Act which made submission to examination mandatory for any adult men called to the board, this was a body project with teeth. Any worries that the examination process overstepped federal power was tempered by the use of extensive physical standards, which provided an air of objectivity and medical validity.

The directive work of the Selective Service stands out at a moment when almost all other

American projects on physique and body weight were managed through advisory means. In the

51 Hon. Samuel A. Weiss, Transcript of speech delivered 19 Feb. 1945, “America’s Physical Fitness Failure,” Congressional Record, 79th Congress, 1st session, p. 2. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 1, Selective Service System Central Files, Box 1733, Folder 605. 176

Post-WWII Era, similar body projects would once again be advisory. The directive work existed for only the briefest of windows. Even when it existed, we find federal power was undercut by the system of dispersed local boards and the vast system of examining doctors who did not always understand these body standards in the same way that Selective Service leadership did.

Still, American men in the 1940s, perhaps those awaiting an induction examination at a site a ways from home, found themselves in a mandatory intimacy with the state, their masculinity predicated on their submission to federal authority. 177

Chapter 6

Advertising as Advising The President’s Council on Physical Fitness in the Post-War Era

In his post-war novel 1984, George Orwell imagined a dystopia of complete government control over the lives of its citizens. An example of this government in action appears early – mandatory, daily, callisthenic exercises for all civilians. While the requirement seems trivial in a world that involves a constant fear of death and a prohibition on love, the scene is memorable.

As a young woman shouts through the television, admonishing “Comrades, put a bit of life into it!,” the main character fakes a smile during the dreaded toe-touches. With government cameras pointed on him at all times, this uncomfortable series of exercises illustrates a small but fundamental variety of government intervention. As the citizens of this world move their watched bodies in time with a television screen, building muscle toward the national good of strong workers and potential soldiers, the scene invokes an invasive government. The state’s power is written on the individual citizen body.1

The world Orwell described resonated in Cold War America. In Orwell’s fictionalized

Soviet state, even the most intimate space – the individual body – was to be planned, monitored, and shaped by the government. American body projects, in turn, would be defined against such an approach. During World War II, some directive body projects had been possible in the US

With a context of emergency, American men submitted to physical examinations and assessments in the name of national security. In the aftermath of that War, though, interventions into American weight and physique would resume a more advisory form. Post-war fitness efforts

1 George Orwell, 1984, New York: Signet Classics, 1961 (first published 1949). 178 would echo the use of pamphlets, schools, and parents which had characterized the Children’s

Bureau and Bureau of Home Economics work in the 1910s-1930s.

Professional football coach Bud Wilkinson provided some of the most explicit arguments about the connection between American physical fitness and American liberties. Wilkinson worried that American boys would not be as fit “as the Russians who will challenge them in the years to come.” He decried the poor stamina and “flabby muscles” of American youth, and complained that key American values like vigor, sacrifice and work were emphasized less and less. While he believed that “no free man can admire the Soviet system” of Orwellian exercise drills, he still concluded by explaining “we should be dangerously wrong not to recognize that the system has its strengths.”2 Indeed, at the end of World War II, the Federal Security

Administration argued that “Japan would not have dared attack us if she had not known of our physical softness and lack of fitness.”3 Repairing American softness would be critical to any lasting post-war peace, it suggested.

This “softness,” like the softness of the Civilian Conservation Corps and of World War

II, was about politics, gender, and sexuality as much as it was about actual physique. At a moment of fierce anti-Communism, being too far to the political left might suggest Communist sympathies, and with it anti-Americanism. To be politically “soft” on Communism was to position oneself against the rugged individualism that was at the heart of how America portrayed itself in the 1950s and 1960s.4 In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger described some progressives as

2 Bud Wilkinson, “Youth Fitness,” Parade, 3 Sept. 1961, p. 4., Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness 3 “Information Guide: The Committee on Physical Fitness,” March 1945, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 208, Records of the Office of War Information, Entry NC-148 84, Records of Natalie Davisen, Box 3, Folder: Physical Fitness. 4 Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Nation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1995); Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke, 1997); William W. Savage, Jr., Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America, 1945-1954, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990). 179

“Doughfaces.”5 Joseph McCarthy conflated such softness with sexuality when he suggested any man against McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was a “Communist or a cocksucker.”6 Not just rhetoric, redbaiting of the early Cold War included campaigns to purge homosexual men from the State Department based on the assumptions that those men could not be trusted with the nation’s secrets.7 The political, sexual, and physical “softness” of American men were discussed interchangeably as the nation tried to recover from one war and prepare for another.

While World War II Army rejection had been in the media regularly during the 1940s, by the 1950s American bodies had become a political preoccupation.8 General Lewis B. Hershey,

Director of the Selective Service System, explained that Americans needed to realize “the seriousness of the problem of the lack of physical fitness.” Hershey described America as “a

Nation of weaklings.”9 Representative Fred Harley (New Jersey – R) said that American

“weakness in physical condition” had been responsible for some of the loss of life in World War

I and World War II, and that Cold War Americans were on the same path.”10

Anxieties about softness would have policy consequences. President Dwight D.

Eisenhower, and later President John F. Kennedy, would respond to the perceived weakness of

5 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, revised edition (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), 38. 6 K. A. Cuordilenone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, (NY: Routledge, 2005). 7 Quotations from K. A. Cuordileone, “Politics in an Age of Anxiety: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949-1960,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 521-522. 8 Periodic Reports of Physical Examinations, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 1, Vol. 1; See Jeffrey Montez de Oca, “As Our Muscles Get Softer, Our Missile Race Becomes Harder’: Cultural Citizenship and the ‘Muscle Gap,’” Journal of Historical Sociology 18, no. 3 (September 2005): 145-171; Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusets, 2001), 180-184; Cuordilenone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 2005, 202-204. 9 Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, “Need for a Campaign for Physical Fitness,” 17 June 1956, 1, John F. Kennedy Archives, President’s Office, Departments and Agencies, Box 94, Folder 2/61-11/62. 10 H. R. 2045, 79th Congress, 1st Session, 7 February 1945, 2; Lt. Col. Francois D’Eliscu, How to Prepare For Military Fitness (New York, W.W. Norton, 1943). 180

American bodies though the 1955 development of the President’s Council on Youth Fitness.11 As federal interest in citizen physique intensified, the Council served as a government intervention, but one that did not reach far enough to alarm critics of federal power in the Cold War Era. Like the advisory state body projects discussed in the first half of this dissertation, the Council had a small budget and little directive authority. As the Office of Research Stations and the Children’s

Bureau had done, the Council relied on a public-private partnership to disseminate its fitness message without stepping outside its official political capacities. Always contrasting its project with the body projects of the Soviet state, the Council would embrace capitalism, consumer culture, and notions of individual choice to promote changes in American physique. In particular, it encouraged parents and teachers to take charge of children’s weight and fitness. It also leaned on groups like Boy Scouts, religious organizations, and community centers to take up its project.

In a shift from earlier advisory body projects, the Council employed a public-corporate partnership to further its goals in an age of expanding mass media. The Civilian Conservation

Corps had spread a vision of a new American male body through pamphlets and posters, the idea of pushing ideas like this was not new to the advisory state, and the extension of these messages to television and film seems a natural move in the age of mass media. What was new was the public-corporate partnership with the advertising industry introduced through the advisory body projects of the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. Advisory state work would now be done with the voluntary assistance of professional advertisers. Such a relationship was essential in the early Cold War, in which state body projects now regularly articulated just how advisory they were, something typically just implied in earlier projects.

11 The Council has gone through a number of name changes over the years. It began as the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, and then became the President’s Council on Physical Fitness under Kennedy. President Lyndon B. Johnson renamed the agency the President’s Council on Fitness and Sports, a name which stuck for forty years. In 2010, however, President Barak Obama renamed it the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition. I refer to it throughout simply as “The Council” throughout, except for places in which the specific name matters. 181

The Muscular State of the Union

In 1955, publications from US News and World Reports to the New York Times to Sports

Illustrated all fixated on the results of a fitness test. Sports Illustrated called it “the report that shocked the present,” and used the evidence to conclude that physical unfitness was “a problem in the United States today, one which goes far deeper and has more serious implications for the future of the nation than many of those which haunt the headlines today.”12 A New York Times reporter described the “muscular state of the union” as “flabby” based on the tests.13 President

Eisenhower and his advisers studied the report with care.

The report was the work of physician Hans Kraus and posture expert Dr. Sonja Weber.

The pair had studied the bodies of American boys and girls in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in a test battery dubbed the Kraus-Weber tests.14 The tests were meant to compare American and

European physical fitness. Kraus and Weber included about 4000 American children and about

3000 European children between the ages of six and sixteen (selected only from Austria, Italy, and Switzerland). The tests included sit-ups, toe-touches, and four other exercises of the lower back and abdominals. There were five muscular strength tests and one flexibility test included in the battery.15

12 Robert H. Boyle, The Report that Shocked the President, Sports Illustrated, 15 August 1955. 13 Jean Mayer, “The Muscular State of the Union,” Time, 6 November 1955. 14 James R. Morrow, Jr., Weimo Zhu, B. Don Franks, Marilu D. Meredith, and Christine Spain, “1958-2008: 50 Years of Youth Fitness Tests in the United States,” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 80, no. 1 (2009):1- 11; Dale P. Mood, Allen W. Jackson and James R. Morrow, Jr., “Measurement of Physical Fitness and Physical Activity: Fifty Years of Change,” Measurement in Physical Education and Exercise 11, no. 4 (2007): 217-227. For a critique of this model, see Vern Seefeldt and Paul Vogel, “Physical Fitness Testing of Children: A 30-Year History of Misguided Efforts?,” Pediatric Exercise Science 1 (1989), especially 295-296. 15 Boyle, The Report that Shocked the President, Sports Illustrated, 1955; “Answering Some Questions on Kraus Weber Test,” National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry 35, Office of the Secretary, Box 23, Folder: Kraus, Hans – 56-61. 182

Almost sixty percent of American children failed at least one of the six tests. Forty-four percent of American children failed the flexibility test, while fewer than eight percent of

European children failed that test. The children on both continents fared better on strength tests than flexibility tests. Still, about thirty-six percent of Americans failed at least one strength test while only about one percent on European youth failed. According to these tests, which Kraus described as studies of the “minimum” rather than optimum levels of fitness, American youth were falling far behind their European peers. Just out of a war in Europe, comparative unfitness took on new significance.

In the years immediately following the publication of the test some fitness researchers attempted, without success, to replicate Kraus’ results. Marjorie Phillips had her lab at Indiana

University replicate the exams on about 1500 American children. She found the children often passed.16 Their back strength and abdominal exam results especially proved extraordinarily better than what Kraus found. Phillips would not wholly denounce the Kraus-Weber tests, but argued that there had been a “serious misrepresentation of true conditions,” which she attributed to “inept analysis” and “irresponsible reporting.”17

The problems with the Kraus-Weber exams’ accuracy and design were of little import, however, once the tests were established in the American political imagination. The results received a great deal of publicity, and the sheer number of scientists and researchers who tried to disprove them only further expresses their influence. The tests were, of course, also only one piece in a growing cultural obsession with male “softness” and unfitness following the war.18 In

16 Marjorie Phillips of Indiana University, “The Health and Fitness of ‘American’ School Children” (speech/talk), Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, 3. 17 Marjorie Phillips of Indiana University, “The Health and Fitness of ‘American’ School Children” (speech/talk), Eisenhower library, Abilene, Kansas, 4. 18 Notes, Meeting of the Committee on Physical Fitness, Federal Security Agency, 16 June 1943, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 880, Folder 605: Physical Education; Hon. Frank Thompson Jr., “Are We a Nation of Softies?,” extension of remarks made in 183 the years following the result, Americans were regularly told that “overweight is…a very serious health hazard” and that obesity is “the greatest problem in preventative medicine in the United

States today.”19 As American political leaders tried to adapt to a post-war culture that would emphasize national security and male-headed nuclear families, the idea that they lacked the men for either was an unacceptable proposition.

When the Kraus-Weber reports reached the White House, their significance was sealed.

President Dwight Eisenhower had a personal interest in weight and fitness. While in office he encouraged the weight loss efforts of friends and colleagues to the point of hosting weight loss contests. He also evangelized about the benefits of a lower carbohydrate diet for weight loss.20

He also had been a five star general during World War II, and had not forgotten the shame of a nearly fifty-percent rejection rate from that war’s draft. Eisenhower described the Kraus-Weber results as “alarming” and signs that the nation was in “a very serious situation.”21 He then called for a political response to the problem of children’s unfitness.22

the House of Representatives, 2 Mary 1956, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 2, Folder: T. 19 Health and Safety, 1953 83, Folder: Leader’s Guide for Health Chairmen, Box 115, Guide to the New York State College of Agricultural Extension Service, 4-H Club records, 1918-2002, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, New York; MetLife, “Why Weight Control,” Distributed by 4-H, 1953, Folder: Leader’s Guide for Health Chairmen, Box 115, Guide to the New York State College of Agricultural Extension Service, 4-H Club records, 1918-2002, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, New York. 20 Dwight Eisenhower to George Allen and Aksel Nielsen, 27 April 1956, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961, DDE Diary Series, Box 14, Folder: Apr’ 56 Misc. (1); Dwight Eisenhower to George Allen, 5 April 1956, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961, DDE Diary Series, Box 14, Folder: Misc. (5); Dwight Eisenhower to George Allen, 4 April 1956, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961, DDE Diary Series, Box 14, Folder: Misc. (5). 21 “Ike Discusses Delinquency with Athletes,” Chicago Daily Tribune (12 July 1955): B5. 22 This was a perceived problem, not necessarily a real one, as the corrections to the Kraus test suggest. Some educators and American youth were upset with being categorized as unfit, leading some boys to even protest by doing hundreds of squats. Representatives from the Federal Security Administration, as well as Gen. Rowntree of the Selective Service Administration, told the protesting boys that their fitness was an exception to the rule. “High School Boys Disprove ‘Softy’ Charge of Colonel, Star (Washington D.C.), 17 April 1943, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 881, Folder: 605 – Physical Education; L.G. Rowntree to William D. Boutwell, 24 April 1943, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 147, Records of the Selective Service System, Entry 45, Box 881, Folder: 605 – Physical Education. 184

Eisenhower appointed Vice President Richard Nixon to head the early investigations into the problem. In August of 1955, Nixon held a luncheon in Denver centered on what he called

“Opportunities for Full Participation.” From the start, the luncheon framed the approach to the fitness problem in terms of advisory work. Nixon wanted to encourage other groups, especially schools, to do more on the subject. The experts in attendance ranged from Dr. Hans Kraus, to

Kraus’ friend and ally fitness crusader Bonnie Prudden, to celebrities like baseball hero Willie

Mays. The group prepared a number of recommendations meant to improve child fitness. They recommended a daily physical fitness period and recess twice a day for students from elementary through high school. The group also argued that better recreation facilities must be built throughout the country if these fitness plans were to be properly implemented. For example, school gymnasiums and pools should be open twelve months a year, and to the public.23 The declaration that better gyms and basketball courts and playgrounds should be erected was not accompanied by a plan to allocate federal funds for local project grants, though. Likewise, there is no record of any attempt to legislate the desired school fitness regulations. Instead, the committee put the onus of such programming and facility-development on local, community organizations and individual educators. YMCAs, Kiwanis, the American Legion, “industrial leaders,” youth recreation leagues, church groups, and college coaches were to do the leg work on these sorts of projects. Recommendations, not resources or requirements, made up the goals of this first Eisenhower administration fitness plan.24

Nixon’s luncheon group led to more meetings, and plans for a mid-September conference on American unfitness. Organizers invited over a hundred representatives from different groups.

23 Packet Materials for Luncheon Meeting with Vice-President Nixon, August 8 1955, 3, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, Staff Files, Admin Assistant and Deputy Assistant for Intergovernmental Relations (Pyle), Box 38. 24 Staff Files, Admin Assistant and Deputy Assistant for Intergovernmental Relations (Pyle), Box 38, Denver Meeting on Physical Fitness, Packet Materials for Luncheon Meeting with Vice-President Nixon, August 8 1955, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas. 185

The majority of invitees came from youth organizations, civic groups, and non-profits that already had histories of concern over physical fitness. Chief of the Children’s Bureau, Martha

Eliot and Marion Folsom of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare represented agencies with long-time investment in child weight and fitness, such as the Baby Weeks and Children’s

Year of the late-1910s. The voluntary organizations which had long made some of those advisory body projects possible, including heads of the Boys and Girls Club, the Campfire Girls,

4-H, the Girl Scouts, and the YMCA were invited. The American Medical Association was there, representing the progression of child measurement and height-weight into the realm of the professional and medical. National security concerns tied to physique were also represented, with

Herbert Hoover and Surgeon General of the Army Silas B. Hays in attendance.25 The remaining attendees – about one-third of the conference, by organizers’ estimates – “would include outstanding, serious-minded sports figures.”26 These included golfer Robert T. Jones, boxer

Gene Tunney, and “Mr. Basketball” himself, George L. Mikan. Their inclusion hinted at the important role that celebrity culture would play in Post-War fitness programs.

The conference would also include a substantial mass media presence. While earlier body projects had included non-profit and educational partners, they had not included reporters. One writer and one broadcaster from each major television news station would be invited. This included CBS, NBC, ABC, and MBS (the Mutual Broadcasting System). Representatives from the United Press Association, the Associated Press, and the International News Service were also

25 Press Release, September 18, 1955, Message for Program of Lowry Air Force Base (Denver), President’s Conference on Fitness of American Youth (September 27-28), Frederic E. Fox, Records, 1953-61, Box 13, Folder Youth, Fitness of American (President’s Conference On), Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 26 Aug 15 1955, Memo, Goodpaster(?) to Governor Adams, “Proposed Denver Meeting on Physical Fitness Program,” Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas. 186 invited.27 The reporters were not invited simply to cover the conference, but to participate in it.

In the post-war age of mass media and mass consumption, it seemed possible that a major news outlet might be just as useful an advisory state tool as a major non-profit organization.28

It was not the celebrity or even media invitations which would prove the most important connections from the conference, though. That honor would be reserved for Theodore Repplier.

Repplier rose in the advertising industry by preparing ads from Packard, TIME, and General

Foods, but began to work on public service announcements supporting the federal government during World War II. He became executive director of the War Advertising Council in 1943, preparing campaigns aimed at using women, retirees, and the disabled on the home front. When the War Advertising Council was reborn simply as the Advertising Council in 1946, Repplier served as its first president.29

The Council, according to its own history, was developed around World War II as a way of gaining social approval for the detested field of advertising. Executives imagined that a public project of free “advertising in the public interest,” would clean up the dark image of the advertiser and help the industry avoid federal regulation and taxes that seemed to loom on the horizon.30 Eisenhower described the Ad Council as “one of the most important agencies in the

27 Memo: August 20, 1955, Bob King to RN (Richard Nixon?), Staff Files, Admin Ass’t and Deputy Ass’t for Intergovernmental Relations (Pyle), Box 38, Denver Meeting on Physical Fitness, Packet Materials for Luncheon Meeting with Vice-President Nixon, August 8 1955, Eisenhower Library, Abiline, Kansas. 28 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992); Thomas Patrick Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia, 2003); Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2007) 29 “Biographical Sketch: T.S. Repplier, President, The Advertising Council, Inc.,” 25 July 1956., Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Lambie Records, Box 25, Folder Advertising Council, Repplier, 1956; “Business and Advertising Serving the People: The Advertising Council: What it Does, How it Does,” brochure, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 9. 30 The Ad Council, Matters of Choice: Advertising in the Public Interest, 1942-2002, available at http://www.adcouncil.org/timeline.html. 187 country.”31 Advertising was the ultimate symbol of open markets, free choice, and the pursuit of individual desires. Folding advertising into government projects made for a stark contrast between American and Soviet federal state-citizen relationships. Public Service Announcements and other social advertisements would use what Eisenhower called “free cooperation among individuals toward common purposes.”32 He explained that “so long as individuals do cooperate to get things done, freely instead of under coercion, our kind of society retains its elasticity and dynamism.” The praise did not end there. Eisenhower appeared to have understood advertising as a critical component of making Americans be good Americans. Surely the Ad Council origins in selling service to the nation at wartime helped feed this understanding. “Once appreciating a need, the American people are quick to act,” Eisenhower wrote. “But public education and communication are difficult. Through the advertising council complex, people are made aware of the programs in which they can cooperate…you have demonstrated the possibility of public response in witness of a free society in action, at its best.”33 The administration understood the public-corporate Ad Council message as a perfect fit with the overall message they wanted to convey, as well as a clear reflection of how Eisenhower himself imagined Americans’ relationship to the state.

Creation of the President’s Council

Eisenhower and Nixon’s large collection of physical fitness experts moved forward cautiously. The group continued holding meetings and conferences to discuss possible plans of

31 Ike to T Repplier, April 10 1953, Box 526, Folder OF 122-A-1 Advertising Industry, Advertising Council, 1952-3 (6), White House Central Files, Official File, 1953-1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 32 Ike to T Repplier, April 10 1953, Box 526, Folder OF 122-A-1 Advertising Industry, Advertising Council, 1952-3 (6), White House Central Files, Official File, 1953-1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 33 D.D. Eisenhower to T. Repplier, April 10 1953, Box 526, Folder OF 122-A-1 Advertising Industry, Advertising Council, 1952-3 (6), White House Central Files, Official File, 1953-1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 188 action, but did not commit to a plan. Nixon convened the large 1956 conference at a site from which participants would be constantly reminded of the national security concerns which foregrounded the president’s fitness project: the United States Military Academy at West Point.

He began the conference by reading a statement on behalf of Eisenhower, a statement that would set the tone for the rest of the event. Echoing his concerns over the relationship between national security and fitness, Eisenhower explained that all politics, all national and international policies, were “no more than words” if the American people were not physically and mentally fit. Federal level attention to fitness was necessary, he insisted. And monitoring citizen fitness fell within the purview of the federal government to the extent it was necessary for ensuring that such a government remained strong. With these words, he opened the door to organized, federal intervention into American bodies en masse.

Any fitness intervention would not, Eisenhower promised, create “an over-riding Federal program.”34 It would be advisory, not directive. At most, he imagined the government would arouse “in the American people a new awareness of the importance of physical and recreation activity.” Eisenhower did not need a directive program to accomplish his goals. He instead intended to use mass media outlets and the assistance of the Ad Council in a powerful public- private alliance. More than any federal body project before it, Eisenhower’s new development would not just be public-private, but public-corporate.

At the West Point conference, a statement from Eisenhower announced an executive order in the works to establish a President’s Council on Youth Fitness. The President’s Council would be an advisory agency to its core. Eisenhower explained that the Council would be staffed with members of his cabinet, who would coordinate the activities of thirty-five federal agencies

34 Frederic E. Fox, Records, 1953-61, Box 13, Folder Youth, Fitness of American (President’s Conference On), Press release, June 19, 1956, James C Hagerty, Press sec of the president, 1-2. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 189 invested in projects even tangentially related to physical fitness. Eisenhower signed the

Executive Order on July 16, 1956, officially willing the agency into existence. He appointed

Shane MacCarthy as Executive Director of the Council.35

Figure 1: Shane MacCarthy (left) and President John F. Kennedy. 1961. JFK Library, White House Collection, JFKWHP-1961-02-17-B MacCarthy, while still working under Vice President Nixon, became the new voice of the federal fitness project. As such, he explained that the new President’s Council on Youth Fitness

“does not dictate fitness programs” and “does not give money for fitness” (emphasis his).

“Fitness can’t be superimposed by mandate or money,” he explained.36 Instead, American

35 “Shane MacCarthy,” Sports Illustrated, 1 October 1956. 36 Shane MacCarthy, Press Release, 1960, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 2, Folder: 1960 Press Releases; “Proposal for the Program of the President’s Council in Youth Fitness,” National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, 190 educators and organization leaders voluntarily accepted federal fitness advice. Even knowing there was no financial incentive for their participation, groups like schools and camps completely restructured physical education programming based on federal advice. At the same time many non-profits and schools demonstrated their trust and respect for federal government, few wanted an explicit expansion of the Council’s powers, budget, or bureaucracy.37 Through the early

1960s, the Council maintained an office with four full time staff members and a small clerical staff assisting them. The annual budget was $315,000.38

The Boy Scouts of America was one of those organizations that used some Council resources, like fitness manuals, and that increased its fitness programming in response to the

Council’s requests. Yet the Boy Scouts of America was explicit about its not wanting to encourage the President’s Council’s growth. Oscar Alverson, Regional Director, Boy Scouts of

America, explained that “We will never have a physical development program superimposed and supervised by our Federal Government; --- A governmental regulated program – would be abhorrent to Americans.” He went on to suggest that “we must match our system of character development plus a voluntary ‘Fitness’ program to include the full use of mass educational media and salesmanship; --Television and News.” Alverson’s statement so neatly summarized the mission of the 1956 and 1957 Council that it made the pitch materials for a PCYF television program as an “endorsement.” While “Sport Rama” was never produced, the selection of

Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 6, Folder: Proposal for....; “President Council on Youth Fitness: Basic Council Policies,” National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 6, Folder: Basic Policies 37 Shane MacCarthy, “To the Members of the President’s Citizens Advisory Committee,” Newsletter from the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (July 26th, 1960): 2, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 1, Folder: 2, Fitness in Action, Aug. 1960. 38 Report to the President (July 30th, 1963), 11, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 3, Folder: Publications 8. 191

Alverson’s words illuminated what both the Council and some of its backers were seeking in the young federal agency.39

Echoing Baby Weeks of the 1910s, a handful of local and state level governments built their own programs based on the attention brought to American fitness by the President’s

Council. Washington State, Nebraska, and New Mexico all held state-wide fitness promotions, like fitness weeks and small conferences. Cities including Philadelphia and Miami prepared local programs and initiatives meant to draw attention to the perceived failure of American physique.40

The President’s Council encouraged these activities but did not provide any resources. The

President’s Council leadership stated that it was “neither the prerogative nor the responsibility” of the President’s Council to assist financially with such initiatives. It could only contribute intellectually. MacCarthy explained that “the council is in a sense a catalyst, a stimulator, an idea-dropper, and a direction-pointer. Its major responsibility is stimulation of the initiative of the home, and of the community with its multiplicity of youth-serving organizations and resources, including the local units of national, public and private agencies.”41 These were words

MacCarthy repeated regular during his tenure with the Council. He has “no funds to dole,” he explained in various venues, and no blueprinted activities, plans, or stereotyped fitness formulae

39 Paul J. McCoy, “Sport Rama” Proposal, 21 Aug. 1956, Box 844, Folder 156-A-6 Fitness of American Youth (2), Central Files, Official File, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 40 “Third Monthly Report, Nov. 16 - Dec. 15 1957,” Memo for all council members, 23 Dec. 1957, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Fred A. Seaton Papers, Ewald Research Files Series, Box 22, Folder PCYF; Shane MacCarthy to conferees, 9 September 1958, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 4, Folder: Council Members’ Department of Commerce, Transcript of Proceedings: Conference on Physical Fitness Incentives for Youth, 11 October 1957, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 9, Folder: Oct. 11 Meeting. 41 Memorandum Proposing the Establishment of a Physical Fitness Laboratory in the University of Kentucky, Dr. Ernst Jokl, 15 Feb 1957; Gov Pyle to Albert Benjamin Chandler, April 29 1957 [report], Box 844, Folder 156-A-6 Fitness of American Youth (3), Central Files, Official File, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS; “Policy Concerning Some Aspects of a Public Relations Program,” 23 May 1958, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 6, Folder: Proposal for; President’s Council on Youth Fitness, “Fitness and the Future,” 1960, 4, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 4, Folder: Publications Folder 14. 192 to try to lower on the people.”42 While MacCarthy’s discussion reflects the realities of previous agencies – the Bureau of Home Economics, say, also had no funds to dole out – his articulation that the agency’s limits were by design is uniquely of the Post-War era.

With the advisory mission of the agency established, its partnership with organizations like the Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, or American Medical Association was a natural step.43 Such

42 Shane MacCarthy, “A Catalytic Agent,” Press Release, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry 35, Office of the Secretary, Box 4, Folder: 1960 Press Release. 193 partnerships, part of the public-private state, were regular fixtures of other advisory state body programs.44 More unusual is the development of a public-corporate partnership. Not only would such an approach to fitness resonate with their modern audiences, the format reinforced the anti-

Soviet and pro-market ideology that undergirded the Council. To begin with, President’s Council leadership would seek television airtime.

In early 1957, White House Assistant Press Secretary Murray Snyder wrote to Clarence

Francis, recently retired Chair of the Board of Directors at the food giant General Foods. During

WWII Francis had become involved with US military defense, and when he retired in 1954 he began devoting all of his energies to government service. Snyder hoped that Francis’ private- sector connections could make the federal fitness message widespread and relatable. The man from General Foods might “be able to make a great contribution to the ‘youth fitness’ effort in which the President is playing a leading part,” Snyder proposed. Snyder explained that

Eisenhower had recently looked over some of the President’s Council’s plans, and decided that if the Council could get its program endorsed by a celebrity it would give the plan much more popular appeal, especially for youth. Eisenhower, inspired by his grandchildren’s fascination with television heroes, thought American kids would find such an endorsement especially exciting. In an early memo titled “The President’s Ideas,” Eisenhower expressed confidence in advertising-based advisory work. “Have [kids] see how to become a HERO by the example of someone on TV,” he explained. “We need slogans – advertising power.”45 This message resonated. “If – by demonstration – these muscular actors would inspire youngsters to become experts at push-ups, chinning the bar and alike, the value of that example might be incalculable,”

43 “Looking Ahead,” Fitness in Action 1, (November 1958) :4, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry E-35, Box 9, Folder: MacCarthy. 44 Klein, For All These Rights, 2003, 8. 45 Dwight Eisenhower, “President’s Ideas,” Memo, 28 Dec. 1956, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 235, Records of Health Education and Welfare, Entry 35 Office of the Secretary, Box 9, Folder President’s Ideas. 194 an aid paraphrased. The President’s Council would be most effective, Eisenhower thought, were it handled more like a corporate advertising campaign and less like a Washington agency.

Clarence Francis seemed an obvious contact for this early advertising project, since

General Foods had been working with the popular Roy Rogers Show for years. Rogers’ show was actually developed through a joint General Foods and NBC contract. The actor starred in advertisements for Jell-O Instant Pudding, Toasties, and Sugar Crisp Cereal. Snyder suggested that Rogers could endorse the President’s Council on Youth Fitness while discussing the nutritional value of the products during advertisements or during the show. Francis thought NBC ran too many repeats of Rogers’ show for it to be a good choice for cross-promotion – Francis believed the Ad Council’s message would quickly become dated while in syndication. Francis recommended endorsements in live programming instead, and passed the information along to the current General Foods advertising Vice President.46 This earliest attempt was not a resounding success, but it helped pave the way for market-oriented advisory state efforts to come.

Eisenhower set up a public-corporate relationship between his fitness agency and the Ad

Council early in his administration. Only by the very end of his time in office did Eisenhower make the most of the Ad Council, though. Shane MacCarthy pushed Eisenhower to make more media appearances in 1960. He agreed, and gave a fifteen minute television and radio appearance on fitness to kick off the first night of his Youth Physical Fitness Week.47 MacCarthy insisted that the President’s Council under Eisenhower had been a success. He said it had “galvanized scores of recognized agencies …and commercial enterprises of impressive size and variety into

46 Hon. Murray Snyder to Clarence Francis, Jan. 8 1957, and Clarence Francis to Hon. Murray Snyder, 10 Jan. 1957, Box 844, Folder 156-A-6 Fitness of American Youth (2), Central Files, Official File; National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 235, Records of Health Education and Welfare. 47 Shane MacCarthy to Sec. of Interior, March 18 1960, Box 844, Folder 156-A-6 Fitness of American Youth (4), Central Files, Official File, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 195 rewarding action.”48 Eisenhower’s President’s Council had laid the groundwork for a market- oriented, advisory approach to repairing the perceived weaknesses of the American citizen. The

President established a relationship between his fitness agency and the Ad Council. That relationship would grow substantially under the next president’s tenure.

Kennedy’s Soft Americans

The Eisenhower-era President’s Council put the perceived unfitness of Americans on the national radar. It had made unfitness such a concern, in fact, that President John F. Kennedy addressed it in a public forum during his first full month in office. Kennedy wrote a Sports

Illustrated article on what he saw as the continuing problem of “the soft American.” Individual unfitness was a national security issue. He explained that “in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.”49 This problem was, Kennedy explained in a twist on the popular Cold War concern over a “missile gap,” in fact a “muscle gap.”50 Like the missile gap, this muscle gap needed to be bridged through some form of federal intervention. Kennedy himself was focused on masculinity and

“courage,” traits that historian K. A. Cuordileone attributes to Kennedy’s childhood medical crises.51 Whatever the root cause of his interest in the topic, the young and apparently healthy

President Kennedy embraced a popular fitness message in way that garnered popular appeal.

Like Eisenhower, Kennedy centered his Council’s work on the perceived failings of

American children’s bodies. The monitoring of children, children’s submission to exercise

48 Shane MacCarthy, Press Release, 1958(?), RG 235, Entry 35, Box 2, Folder 1958 Press Releases, National Archives at College Park, MD. 49 John F. Kennedy, “The Soft American,” Sports Illustrated, 26 December 1960. 50 Jeffrey Montez de Oca, “As Our Muscles Get Softer, Our Missile Race Becomes Harder’: Cultural Citizenship and the ‘Muscle Gap,’” Journal of Historical Sociology 18, no. 3 (September 2005): 145-171 51 K. A. Cuordilenone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, (NY: Routledge, 2005). 196 programs, public service announcements, and even fitness advice was less problematic than any federal attempt to manage adult men. The timing was appropriate as well. In 1961, the PCYF announced that half of a 200,000 student pilot program failed its basic fitness test.52 Simon

McNeely, a Physical Education teacher and an adviser to the Kennedy administration, argued that Americans were not simply at the same level of fitness, but were in fact getting worse and worse. Vaguely citing a study of college freshmen, McNeely said that sixty percent of young men passed a fitness test in 1948, and forty percent passed in 1953, but in 1961 only thirty-five percent of those men passed.53 Meanwhile Selective Service Chief Lewis Hershey continued making the connection between youth unfitness and national insecurity into the Kennedy years.

“Young Americans must be made fit – to serve our nation in its hour of need,” he explained in

1962, they must be “fit to face the future with confidence and strength.”54 Such statements and the accompanying fitness statistics circulating in the popular presses were inconsistent. Some claimed one out of six young men were unfit, some claimed one out of four, and some claimed one out of two – it was not the reality of the numbers but the continuing anxiety that came with them that made physical fitness as pressing an issue as it was.55 Kennedy himself called the numbers “frightening.”

Kennedy argued that “it is paradoxical that the very economic progress, the technological advance and scientific breakthroughs which have, in part, been the result of our national vigor

52 “50 P.C. Failures Reported in Pilot Youth Fitness Test,” New York Times Herald Tribune, 3 Dec. 1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 53 Anne Christmas, “Physically Unfit Americans Held a Grave Problem,” Washington Star, 15 Aug. 1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 54 “President Appeals to Schools to Help Youth Gain Fitness,” New York Times, 5 Sept. 1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 55 Edward T. Folliard, “Physical Fitness Levels Deplored by President,” Baltimore Sun, 8 July 1962, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 197 have also contributed to the draining of that vigor.” He continued on, blaming automation, transportation, and sedentary entertainment options for this lack of vigor. This leisure and luxury, he explained, could be “the instruments of the decline of our national vitality” and prevent continued national progress.56

56 John F Kennedy, “The Vigor We Need.” Sports Illustrated , 16 July 1962. 198

From the start, the Kennedy-era Council made media its number one project, throwing itself even more into advertising methods than Ike’s council had. The council changed its name

Figure 3: “Any kid who wants my job..” magazine Ad, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Box 4, Folder: Pub. 11

199 from the president’s council on “youth” to the president’s council on “physical fitness,” broadening its appeal.57 They hired Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson as their first celebrity spokesman. They quickly began advertising, including a 1961 series of one-minute spots by astronauts (market research, now transformed into a tool of policy-making, had shown

Cold War American kids loved astronauts). A New York City firm handled the ads pro-bono, and ABC provided free airtime.58

The partnership between the Ad Council and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness bloomed under Eisenhower, and then flourished under Kennedy. The Ad Council’s large collection of designers and writers and its extensive network of media contents made it simple for an agency like the President’s Council to get innumerable ads and tons of free airtime. By

1961, the Ad Council fully embraced the agency, exploding the reach of the organization. The

Ad Council would now help the Kennedy administration sell physical fitness to American citizens through regular advertising. “We cannot force youth to become fit,” explained one

Kennedy-era bureaucrat, “we must motivate them to want to do the things that will make them fit.”59 Comparing the job of the PCYF with that of the breakfast cereal companies which he was more used to working with, the speaker explained the importance of making physical fitness

“palatable” and “popular” if they were going to “make our prospects pant to buy our product.”60

The sales effort would also need to be backed up with a merchandising program, he explained,

57 Report to the President, (December 10th, 1962), 8, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 3, Folder: Publications 8. 58 7 Astronauts to Plug Fitness of US Youths,” Washington Star, 23 July 1961, Bud Wilkinson, “Youth Fitness,” Parade, 3 Sept. 1961, p. 4., Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 59 Robert M. Hoffman, “Telling and Selling the Fitness Story,” in President’s Council on Youth Fitness, “Recreation Planning for Fitness: Workshop Report No. 8, 1960, p. 8. National Archives, Special Commissions RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 4, Folder Pub. 14. 60 Hoffman, “Telling and Selling the Fitness Story,” 1960, Report to the President (July 30th, 1963), 4, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Box 4, Folder: Pub. 14.. 200 advertising speak for how involved parents and teachers were expected to become if the advertised fitness message were to be translated into real programs.

The Ad Council aimed to make people excited for fitness with a series of print and radio ads, advice books and booklets, and music and film specials. The PCYF placed ads in over 600 newspapers, 650 television stations, and 3,500 radio stations – spots paid for by the Ad Council and designed through the Ad Council, especially the advertising firm Young & Rubicam.61 In

1963, the President’s Council reported that it received 15 million dollars of advertising “at no cost to taxpayers.”62 Such advertising most memorably included the calisthenics song “Chicken

Fat,” written by Meredith Wilson (better known for composing The Music Man) and sung by

Robert Preston (better known for starring in The Music Man, Mame, and other Broadway productions and films). “Chicken Fat” sold 115,000 records in its first year of release.63 Bing

Crosby had his son sing what The New York Times referred to as a “labored” version of the song on a 1962 television special.64 Dinah Shore sang a less labored version on the Dina Shore Chevy

Show.65 The primary audience, though, was primary schools. They played the records in the classroom (or over the school’s intercom first thing in the morning). The song exhorted its listeners to exercise “every morning,” and “not just now and then.” Through the toe touches, push-ups, and marching in place, the calisthenics record encouraged basic exercises to a catchy

61 Ad Council Meeting Minutes, 6, Ad Council Archives, University of Illinois, RS:13/2/201, Folder “Meeting Minutes, May-June 1962.” 62 Report to the President (July 30th, 1964), 9, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 3, Folder: Publications 8. 63 Newsletter from the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (November 8th, 1963): 2, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 1, Folder: 2, Fitness in Action, Aug. 1960. 64 Jack Gould, “TV Hope and Crosby,” New York Times (15 May 1962). 65 Script, “The Dinah Shore Chevy Show,” October 6, 1961, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Office of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry 35, Office of the Secretary, Box 16, Folder: The Dinah Shore Show. 201 tune. The PCYF-commissioned song lasted just under six-and-a-half minutes (the long version), which hardly made for a lengthy sweat session.

More than it actually made students fit, it was part of the continued “awareness” campaigning that characterized PCYF ideas. Like any other PCYF campaign, it reminded youth of the importance of a hard (not soft) body and of vigor as a component of good citizenship. As the song phrased it, “nuts to the flabby guys!” Its lyrics insisted instead that kids “give that chicken fat back to the chicken, and don’t be chicken again.” With the relationship between fat and cowardice (being “chicken”) established, the song exhorted all the students to sing the final lyric aloud to really hammer it in: “go, you chicken fat, go!”66 With the help of the organizational support of the Ad Council and the financial support of the Equitable Life

Insurance Company, the President’s Council even released a film. Youth Physical Fitness: A

Report to the Nation included appearances by Gene Kelly, Bob Hope, Alan Shepard, and of course John F. Kennedy.67 The film reached an audience of more than 84,000 citizens who saw it on the big screen, and another three million who saw it during one of the film’s ninety television screenings.68

As with Eisenhower’s Council, the voluntary fitness projects of schools and teachers continued to play a major role in the early organization of the President’s Council. In August

1961, celebrity representative Bud Wilkinson offered a five-point program for youth fitness in the American Medical Association publication Today’s Health. In it, Wilkinson advocated

66 The gender dynamics of this council are tricky. It originated from discussions of failed wartime masculinities, and oftentimes is discussed in masculine language. Comments about “the flabby guys” and the “chicken” fat are also about failed masculinities and the pervasive fear of ‘softness.’ Yet the President’s Council also gave lip service to girls’ physical fitness (and, by the mid-1969s, to women’s physical fitness), in ways that no agency had done previously. Even the chicken fat includes a “girls too” reference. 67 Newsletter from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, (November 8th, 1963):2-3, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 1, Folder 2. 68 Report to the President, 10 Dec. 1962, p. 7, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 3, Folder: “Publications 8.” 202 fitness screening for pre-school aged children and exercise programs for the failing students that included frequent re-testing. He suggested that students face these tests at the beginning of each subsequent school year, along with school-initiated corrective programming for failures of every age.69 The programming suggestion was perfectly in line with the small government ideology/big government aims of the Council, and the Council turned Wilkinson’s ideas (which had been developed with oversight from medical and educational organizations) into a 112 page book.

From the voluntary induction of schools, to the partnership with the American Medical

Association to spread and support Wilkinson’s message, obtaining voluntary participation from schools remained a part of the President’s Council’s mission.

Even here, school programming was often handled with a strong media orientation. In

1962 for instance, Kennedy followed up on Wilkinson’s projects by publically urging schools and school boards to initiate programs. The programs, he explain, could be based on the booklets and campaigns developed by the Council on Youth Fitness.70 At multiple points in his speech,

Kennedy emphasized just how voluntary such programming was. “The Council does not desire to prescribe specific activities or tests. However, it strongly encourages every school to adopt the basic philosophy of Wilkinson’s program.” As a starting point, the President recommended interested parties send forty cents to the US Publishing Office for a copy.71 Such media campaign-based programming further distanced the Council from those it was theoretically

69 “Youth Fitness Head Urges 5-Point Plan,” New York Times, 25 Aug. 1961, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 70 Edward T. Folliard, “Physical Fitness Levels Deplored by President,” Baltimore Sun, 8 July 1962, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 71 The President’s Council on Physical Fitness, “Statements by the President,” US Government Printing Office, 1963. 203

Figure 4: The President’s Council on Youth Fitness appeals to teachers. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Box 4, Folder: Pub. 11

204 designed to serve. Still the program worked when measured by President’s Council goals: almost

28,000 schools requested programming information from the federal agency by 1964.72

Advisory programming was changing physical fitness in schools. According to Council statistics published in 1964, fewer than 18 million school children participated in physical education programs in 1961, while about 27 million did by 1964. About sixty percent of those students had a physical education program of some sort at least three times a week. At the encouragement of the Council, schools elected to conduct fitness tests on about fifty-five percent of school-age children.73 Some of these fitness initiatives even got to the point of political and legislative interests at the state and local level. By 1963, thirteen states formally strengthened their physical education requirements, and 31 states had some sort of state level fitness commission.74 By 1964, twelve states strengthened requirements for school accreditation in health and physical education.75

Federal agencies also were spurred toward action, starting with the Federal Aviation

Agency’s D.C. offices’ development of voluntary employee fitness programs. The President’s

Council used the Federal Aviation Agency’s program as a shining example, reporting success as weight loss: in the first six months men lost an average of seven pounds and women an average of eighteen.76 Soon after the program was introduced to employees at the Nation Aeronautics and

72 Years For Fitness, 1961-1965: A Report to the President. October 1965, p. 17. National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 3, Folder “Publications 8,” 2-4. 73 Newsletter From the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, July 27, 1964, Box 1, Fold 2: Fitness in Action, Aug 1960, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness; Report to the President (July 30th, 1963), 2-3, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 3, Folder: Publications 8. 74 Report to the President, 30 July 1964, 3, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 3, Folder “Publications 8.” 75 Report to the President, 30 July 1964, 1-2, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 3, Folder “Publications 8”; Bud Wilkinson to John F. Kennedy, 30 July 1963 76 Years For Fitness, 1961-1965: A Report to the President. October 1965, p. 17. National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 3, Folder “Publications 8,” 17. 205

Space Association and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. While representatives like Shane MacCarthy had once explained that owing to its structure the Council would never be able to receive all the credit owed to it, the Council ultimately had no trouble taking some of that acclaim.

While some of the campaigns under Kennedy employed the language of military unfitness, as they had done under Eisenhower, even more of the campaigning of the 1960s began to focus on employment. The much discussed weak bodies were not just signs of potential military weakness, but also of intellectual and economic weakness. Poor physical fitness was imagined to contribute to inadequate work performance. Critics grew vocally concerned that

American civilians were too weak to hold down jobs, especially the unknowable jobs of the future. Absenteeism and industrial accidents were attributed almost entirely to employee unfitness, and according to one federal statistic a full one-and-a-quarter-million people were absent every day due to their physical unfitness.77 Youth in bad physical shape supposedly had a worse attitude toward schoolwork, earned lower grades and skipped more classes than their fit peers.78 The actual numbers used to support these assertions were questionable, and the differentiation between the grades of the fit and unfit was insignificant. Even dramatic differences, however, would only prove a correlation rather than a causal relationship.

Nevertheless, the idea of a threat to productivity from poor fitness spread. How would post-war economic growth continue with weak bodies and weak wills behind the wheel?

The President’s Council approached the potential economic loss attributable to un-fit

Americans which emphasized the importance of demanding careers. Advertisements issued by

77 Bob Steward to Joseph Califano Jr., 9 Dec. 1965, 6, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 235, Records of Health Education and Welfare, Entry 35 Office of the Secretary, Box 47, Folder Legislation 1965. 78 Report to the President, 10 Dec. 1962, p. 4, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 220 Records of the President’s Commission on Physical Fitness, Box 3, Folder: “Publications 8.” 206 the council between 1960 and 1965 focused on the economic consequences of not embracing economic excellence through physical fitness and approved physique. “Any kid who wants my job,” one astronaut in a print advertisement explains, “will have to be in pretty good shape.”79

“The future belongs to the fit,” another astronaut-related ad explains. “In space or surgery, farming or finance, nursing or news reporting,” the future belongs to the fit. “The future belongs to those vigorous enough to live it…Medical authorities put it this way: it is a tragic waste to highly educate the minds of our children and neglect the physical conditioning that can help them participate in the future to the fullest extent of their abilities.”80 The language of

‘pioneers,’ which united issues of economic success, ‘the future,’ and masculine independence also proved popular. Fitness was sold on the basis of a variety of jobs, from astronaut to scientist to construction worker.

The President’s Council also began to specifically promote fitness for girls and women in the early 1960s. “Physical fitness is for everybody,” one radio ad prepared for the

Council explained, “girls, too.”81 These promotions were similarly framed around career paths that might require fitness, and reiterated the line that “the future is for the fit.” President’s

Council spokesman and professional football coach Bud Wilkinson explained how this might apply to girls. “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” he asked all of the children. “A doctor or an engineer? A scientist of a technician?” Then he added that, “if you are a girl, you may plan to combine a career in teaching, business, or some other field with being a housewife

79 National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 1, Folder: 2, Fitness in Action, Aug. 1960, Box 1, Folder 1. 80 National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 1, Folder: 2, Fitness in Action, Aug. 1960, Box 1, Folder 1. 81 Transcript for 20 second audio spot, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 235, Records of Health Education and Welfare, Entry 35, Office of the Secretary, Box 46, Folder: Gardner Advertising Agency 1964-5. 207

Figure 5: “The Future Belongs to the Fit” – one of the ads targeted toward young girls, in this case showing a nurse. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Box 4, Folder: Pub. 10

and mother.”82 The vision of what the future might hold for fit young women was, indeed, not the same as the image of a fit young man’s future. As one television spot explained: “girls, besides helping you shape the future, physical fitness does pretty nice things for your own shape,

82 Bud Wilkinson, Mss. for Book of Knowledge, December, 26 1963, 1, National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 235, Records of Health Education and Welfare, Entry 35, Office of the Secretary, Box 28, Folder: Articles 1963. 208 too!”83 Such a tone was new. The inclusion of girls at all, however, is a substantial departure from most of the body projects I have discussed thus far.

The President’s Council slowly branched into adult fitness as well, which included attempts to partner with corporations for employee fitness programs, which targeted both men and women. The agency even sent out form letters with Adult Physical Fitness pamphlets to the thousand largest companies in the nation, with the message that employers could use these to inspire their executives – and in time all their employees – to higher levels of fitness.84 One of the five stated goals of the President’s Council by the early 1960s was to spread private and government employee fitness programs.85 In a nation in which the rights and opportunities of citizenship were based on male employment, any theoretical threat to the ability to do your job was a political threat.86 Now, though, there was a government agency designed to undo the damage. As with schools and churches, the President’s Council actively encouraged companies to promote fitness through programs and incentives, allowing workplace regulation to carry the burden of forceful programming.

The domestic, economic approach of the campaign under Kennedy marked a political move toward a politics linking physical, moral, and economic strength with moderate-to-left politics. The administration chided the overemphasis on consumption and spending in the

Eisenhower years, promising a morally, physically, and economically improved nation in the years to come. Ironically, it was the tools that had been singled out as weakening America, the

83 Form for advertisement, audio transcript: [60 sec spot] (1964 or 1965), National Archives II, College Park MD, RG 235, Records of Health Education and Welfare, Entry 35, Office of the Secretary, Box 46, Folder: Folder Gardner Advertising Agency 1964-5. 84 Newsletter from the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (November 8th, 1963): 2, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 1, Folder: 2, Fitness in Action, Aug. 1960; Newsletter from the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (March 6th, 1964): 2. 85 National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 1, Folder: 2, Fitness in Action, Aug. 1960. 86 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York, Oxford, 2001). 209 tools of advertising and consumption, which were selected as the tools that would be used to physically strengthen America. As public intellectuals and even Kennedy himself blamed affluence for weakening America, advertising campaigns became one of the only politically acceptable ways to try to physically strengthen citizens.

Conclusion

Kennedy declared at the 1960 Democratic National Convention that the nation needed

“leadership, not salesmanship.” Through his work with the President’s Council, though, both were entangled. The President’s Council used advisory state techniques to encourage national fitness. Its use of advisory technique was not simply the result of limited financial and bureaucratic resources. Unlike the Children’s Bureau or Bureau of Home Economics, anti-

Communism and anti-statism led the President’s Council chose to remain as small and minimally funded as it could manage. Instead of creating programming, drafting regulations, or funding local-level innovation, the Council focused above all else on public service announcements and the publication of other materials. This approach had inherent problems. As its early-1960s spokesman Bud Wilkinson once described, “nobody’s really against us or this program, but nobody’s really for it, or if they are they only pay lip service to it.”87 For the President’s Council, the possibility that no one would take the fitness program seriously was still preferable to an expansion of state power or bureaucracy.

The Council grew in size after Kennedy, but it remained consistent with advisory state principles and programs. President Lyndon Johnson increased the Council’s emphasis on sports and established fitness awards meant to encourage youth participation. In the 1970s, the Council increased the amount of adult programming it offered, and began pairing with industry to

87 “Bud Wilkinson Drumming for Youth Fitness,” Chicago Tribune, 4 Aug. 1962, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, Republican National Committee, News Clippings, Box 640, Folder [Youth] National Youth Fitness. 210 directly encourage employee physical fitness. Under President Ronald Reagan, the Council focused on fitness testing, building on Johnson’s President’s Challenge. In an intensified advisory state moment, that administration contracted out fitness testing to the non-profit

Amateur Athletic Union, the organization which runs the country’s advisory fitness test to this day.88

88 Charles Oldham, “The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports: The First 50 Years,” (Tampa: Faircount, 2006). 211

212

Conclusion

As Americans try to grapple with the politics of our collective size and shape today, try to understand soda taxes and trans fat bans, we do so in the shadow of more than a hundred years of debate over how physique should be managed. Between 1880 and 1965, state projects to manage the shape, size, weight, and physique of American citizens were usually handled through advisory technique. Through research, education, advertisement, advice, publications, and standardization, the American body was shaped in ways that could not be directly legislated. In unusual circumstances, such as full mobilization for war, more directive programs were possible.

In general, though, these body projects were instituted in ways that strongly encouraged, rather than demanded, citizens monitor their bodies according the federal interests.

By the late-1960s, the US federal government was involved in several projects on fitness and physique. This was not a coherent plan of intervention into the body, but instead several, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory, approaches. Some programs involved became more directive, like those within the military and food programs for poor women. Meanwhile, advisory nutrition programming intensified.

Military

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports partnered with the Department of

Defense in the early 1960s to encourage all military branches to better monitor and manage the weight and fitness of its soldiers.449 Major John D. Wightman, in a presentation on Army readiness, argued that the problem was “the assumption that the soldier is a finished project

449 Report to the President (July 30th, 1963), 4, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, Box 3, Folder: Publications 8. 213

physically.”450 In response to some of the same concerns which launched civilian fitness

programs in the 1950s and 1960s – an apparently “unfit” Army – the Department of Defense

mandated regular physical exams, weighing, and exercise throughout the services. According to

the 1961 directive, all physical fitness programs needed to “include weight control standards”

and provisions “in cases where personnel are found to be overweight.”451 With this federal

mandate, weight not only became a reason for initial rejection from the services, it also became a

reason one could be discharged at any point in one’s military career. Although the standards used

in World War II provided the foundation for this move, just twenty years later the focus would

be almost entirely on monitoring the overweight rather than underweight body.

Figure 1: Marine Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. This is a “before and after” weight loss graphic prepared by the Marine Corps. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, E 35, Box 43, Folder: Armed Forces Fitness, 1965

450 Major John D. Wightman, “The Goal of the Physical Readiness Program,” Speech, December 2, 1965, 4, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 235, Records of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry 35, Box 44, No folder. 451 Department of Defense Directive, “Physical Fitness Programs,” November 20, 1962, No. 1308.1, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 35, Records of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Entry 35, Box 20, Folder: Department of Defense 1962. 214

Both male and female soldiers were required to regularly participate in physical activities and to pass examinations twice each year. This was an extraordinarily directive development.

Although the services took these steps, however, weight has only increased as a concern of military leadership. The Army’s Weight Control Program uses height-weight statistics and body fat percentages, as well as fitness tests, to assess soldier readiness. “Soldiers will be coached to select their personal weight goals,” the program explains, so that exceeding it “will ‘trigger’ the

Soldier to use the substantial help available to alter the fitness and dietary behavior before confronting the finality of the screening table and the initiation of official action.”452 The use of these standards and of quantification suggests a directive program similar to that used by the

Army in World War II. In some ways the program is more forceful, as men and women are regularly put on probation and discharged from their full time jobs. On the other hand, contemporary soldiers work for an all-volunteer military; they were not the draftees of World

War II.

Social Welfare

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is an example of a directive project. WIC was first tested in 1972 (as the Special Supplemental

Food Program), and became a nation-wide program in 1974. In the mid-1960s, the nation

“discovered” poverty, especially in the South and in Appalachia.453 Those who supported increased funding to address the issue emphasized that money alone was not enough to address the malnutrition problem. Instead, proponents of increased aid like Senator George McGovern

452 “The Army Weight Control Program,” Army Regulation 600-9 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, November 2006), 2. 453 Victor Oliveira, Elizabeth Racine, Jennifer Olmsted and Linda M. Ghelfi, The WIC Program: Background, Trends, ad Issues, Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Report No. 27 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, 2002), 7. 215

Figure 2: Sample WIC voucher for California, to be used only for the food size and type listed in the check. 2012. “Authorized Food List/Shopping Guide,” http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/wicworks argued that the inadequate education of poor Americans left them unprepared to make healthy choices for their families.454 WIC was a solution to specifically address this issue.

The program provides block grants to each state. The state then, in consort with industry, develops a list of specific food items which low-income mothers can purchase with vouchers.

While Food Stamps (The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) have been digitized for almost twenty years, WIC continues to use paper vouchers that can only be used on very specific items (pictured).455 As a program created to alleviate malnutrition, the agency currently focuses energy on managing the weights of its participants. WIC itself does not weigh participants, but like the Children’s Bureau of the 1910s and 1920s it monitors health in relation to weight.456 The program includes regular nutrition education, both during benefit renewal meetings and in the form of classes. Women cannot be denied benefits for skipping nutrition classes, and the classes

454 National Archives, Legislative Archives, Washington, DC, RG 46, Records of the US Senate, 90-91st Cong., Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, Select Committee of Nutrition, Box 1, Folder: 12/16/68. 455 Although SNAP/food stamps have switched over fully to Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), WIC is still primarily a paper-based program. Five states now use EBT for WIC, and the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 does require the entire nation switch to EBT for WIC by 2020. Many states are in the planning stages for this switch, but in the meantime most WIC clients still use paper vouchers. See “Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC): Implementation of the Electronic Benefit Transfer-Related Provisions of Public Law 111-296 – Proposed Rule,” http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/regspublished/EBTproposedrule.htm 456 Oliveira et al, The WIC Program, 2002, 19. 216 have been carefully designed to not seem forceful (“Affirm” client statement, one instruction set for WIC teachers reminds five times in two pages).457 Still, these classes must be understood as a stronger force than the nutrition education initiatives of a group like the Bureau of Home

Economics.458 Nutrition classes offered by the same agency and case workers who manage ones’ benefits are a more directive voice than those not tied to material benefits. The nutrition education aspects of WIC can be understood as continuations of earlier diet education programming, which the addition of specific food checks is a more recent and more directive addition only possible because of the social welfare aspect of the program.

The War on Obesity

The so-called “War on Obesity,” or government level management of national weight, is a pervasive yet primarily advisory concept. It is not a single program, but a series of initiatives based in a number of federal agencies. Most discussions of obesity and the state overlook how the issues and related programing are continuations of earlier projects.459. Although medicalization has become a dominant discourse in discussions of the body today, it is still challenged. Theorist Jonathan Metzl sums up his disapproval: “we encounter someone whose

457 “Savvy Shopper Individual Education Script,” Savvy Shopper program, California Department of Public Health, http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/wicworks/Pages/WIC-NE-SavvyShopper.aspx 458 Oliveira et al, The WIC Program, 2002, 4. 459 Natalie Boero, Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American “Obesity Epidemic” (New Brunswick, Rutgers, 2012); J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic (Oxford: Oxford, 2006); Esther D. Rothblum, “I’ll Die for the Revolution, but Don’t Ask Me Not to Diet: Feminism and the Continuing Stigmatization of Obesity,” in Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, Eds. Patricia Fallon, Melanie A. Katzman, and Susan C. Wooley (New York: Guilford, 1994), 55-57; Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, (New York: Nation Books, 2006); Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgan, Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It, (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004); Greg Critser, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, (New York: Mariner Books, 2004); Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, (Berkeley: University of California, 2012); Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, (New York: Random House, 2013). 217 body size we deem excessive and reflexively say, ‘obesity is bad for your health,’ when what we mean is…that they are lazy or weak of will.”460

Height-weight tables began to move from the hands of agencies like the Children’s

Bureau and Public Health Service in the late-1920s and early 1930s. By the 1930s, “well baby visits,” in which a doctor monitored that height-weight data. While the roots of the medicalization of weight go far back, sociologist Jeffery Sobal argues that “the medicalization of obesity took off” in the late 1950s.461 It was in the late 1950s and early 1960s that obesity was regularly described as a disease. What sort of disease it was, exactly, was a different question: some researchers discussed it as a genetic disease, others an addiction or personality disorder, and still others discussed it as a hormonal (endocrinological) disturbance.462 These definitions were eventually negotiated into one definition, published in 1990.

The power of labeling some body weights healthy and others diseased was codified by the work of the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CDC researchers popularized data about increasing obesity rates in the country through a color-coded slide show.

As the nation became heavier, the map turned an ominous deep red.463 In 1999, the Journal of the

American Medical Association published the CDC research, both calling the rising body weight of the nation an “epidemic.”464 While obesity was discussed as a disease before 1999, it had not been discussed as an “epidemic.” Not unlike Atwater’s popularization of the “calorie” and the carbohydrate, the naming of obesity as an epidemic disease is the main thing that made it one.

460 Jonathan M. Metzl, “Why Against Health?” in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland (NY: NYU, 2010), 2. 461 Jeffery Sobal, “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity,” in Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems, ed. Donna Maurer and Jeffery Sobal (Hawthorne, New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995), 68. 462 Sobal, “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity,” 1995, 71. 463 Oliver, Fat Politics, 2006, 40-43. 464 Oliver, Fat Politics, 2006, 42.. 218

Directive and Advisory Projects of the Future

As the rhetoric around American weight and physique ramps up, so too do projects attempting to address body problems. Some argue funding for mass transit, sidewalks and street lights, and community gardens must be provided by the state as we move forward.465 Such an allocation of funds would certainly be a directive project. Encouragement rather than direct funding is a more likely, and more advisory, intervention. Others argue that the federal government must get out of all food and nutrition programming. They say that federal interventions are poorly done, as with a confusing food pyramid, lenient height-weight standards, or agricultural policy choices that value profit over health.466 This opposition is shaped by increasingly directive body projects like soda taxes, trans fat bans, and mandatory nutrition labels.467 Thus far, such projects have only been instituted at the local and state level, or, in the case of labeling, have been adopted by industry nation-wide to circumvent more extensive regulation. An expansion of such measures, including federal level regulation, is still regularly debated. It is unclear just how directive or advisory future state body projects will be.

Whatever steps are taken next, we must keep their historical context in mind. Michelle

Obama demands increased participation in managing children’s physique, she is unconsciously

465 Antronette K. Yancey, Joanne Leslie, and Emily K. Abel, “Obesity at the Crossroads: Feminist and Public Health Perspectives,” Signs 31, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 425-443. 466 Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, 2nd ed., (Berkeley: University of California, 2007); Deirdre Barrett, Waistland: The Re/evolutionary Science Behind Our Health and Fitness Crisis, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, (New York: Penguin, 2007); Wenonah Hauter, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, (New York: New Press, 2012). 467 Joshua Greenman, “Embrace the Nanny State – But Reject the Soda Ban,” New York Daily News (June 6 2012, Opinion; Aaron Sankin, “New California Soda-Tax Bill Under Consideration,” Huffington Post (April 26 2013), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/california-soda-tax_n_3165417.html; Patrick McGreevy, “Oil and Soda Taxes Advance in California Legislature,” Los Angeles Times (May 1, 2013); Jon Terbush, “Will New York Really Ban Fat Riders from its Bike Share Program, The Week (May 3, 2013); “Worry About Food Stamp Growth, Not Junk Food,” Editorial, Chicago Tribune (May 20, 2013); Karen Harned, “The Michael Bloomberg Nanny State: A Cautionary Tale,” Forbes (May 10, 2013); Sandra Pedicini, “As Grocers, Restaurants Bicker, Many Menus Still Lack Calorie Count,” Orlando Sentinel (May 19, 2013); Margaret Hartmann, “City-Funded Study Finds City’s Ban on Trans Fats Was a Huge Successful,” New York (July 16, 2012). 219 drawing on the same techniques and strategies that the Children’s Bureau used in the 1920s. The history of federal weighing projects built on the voluntary labor of mothers and teachers has slowly naturalized both the idea this is mothers’ work and the idea that the scale hold objective truth about child health. It is only against that historical backdrop that we are able to see the scale and height-weight chart as public, not private, concerns.

220

Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

Abilene, Kanas Dwight D. Eisenhower Library Eisenhower Administration Oral History Project, James M. Lambie Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961 Papers of Frederic E. Fox Papers of Bryce N. Harlow, 1953-1961 Republican National Committee Staff Files, Phillip. A Areeda Staff Files, James M. Lambie, Jr. White House Central Files Beltsville, Maryland National Agricultural Library, Special Collections Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics Wilbur Olin Atwater Papers Boston, Massachusetts John F. Kennedy Library Personal Papers of Joseph E. Winslow Personal Papers of Timothy J. Reardon President’s Office Files White House Central Files College Park, Maryland National Archives II Records of Headquarters Army Ground Forces (RG 337) Records of the Agricultural Research Service, 1906-1998 (RG 310) Records of the Army Staff (RG 319) Records of the Children’s Bureau (RG 102) Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps (RG 35) Records of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (RG 235) Records of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics (RG 176) Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture (RG 16) Records of the Office of War Information (RG 208) Records of the Public Health Service, 1912-1968 (RG 90) Records of the Secretary of War (RG 107) Records of the Selective Service System, 1940- (RG 147) Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards (RG 220) Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs (RG 165) Ithaca, New York Cornell University Cooperative Extension Records, 1915-2004 New York State College of Agriculture Extension Service New York State College of Home Economics Records, 1875-1979 Tompkins County Extension Records 221

Wilbur Olin Atwater Papers Urbana-Champaign, Illinois University of Illinois Advertising Council Archives Washington, D.C. Center for Legislative Archives at National Archives I Records of the United States Senate (RG 46) National Academies of Science Food and Nutrition Research Board National Library of Medicine

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Rachel Louise Moran

[email protected] http://rachellouisemoran.com/

EDUCATION

2013 Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies, The Pennsylvania State University 2008 M.A. in History and Women’s Studies, The Pennsylvania State University 2006 B.A. in History and Women's Studies, Syracuse University

PUBLICATIONS

“Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal,” Journal of American History 76, (March 2011): 1001-1022.

Review of Dona Brown, Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America, in Journal of American Studies 46, Special Issue 2, (May 2012): E40.

FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS

2011-2012 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

2011-2012 Miller Center Fellowship in Politics and History, Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia.

2010-2011 The Crawford Family Fellowship in Ethical Inquiry, Pennsylvania State University, College of Liberal Arts.

2011 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, Science, Technology, and Society Program.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

2012 “The Advisory State: Physical Fitness through the Ad Council, 1955-1965,” American Historical Association, January 7.

2011 “Puny and Pudgy Privates: Measuring Draftees in WWII,” History of Science Society, November 5.