Figure 3. The Children’s Bureau included this sample of a child’s health record in a series of pamphlets designed to prepare clubwomen to hold child health conferences as a part of Children’s Year. This was an attempt to standardize the conference experience and the definitions of child health, as well as allow the Children’s Bureau to collect data. Children’s Year Pamphlet No. 2, Part 3, Bureau Publication No. 38 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 7.
The newly created bureau height-weight tables replaced most of their predecessors, becoming the gold standard for child measuring, which in turn was the gold standard for 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.103 It kept a toehold in child health, though, by setting the terms on which experts would discuss child health in the immediate future.
During the Children’s Year, which ran April 1918–April 1919, the Great War ended. The Children’s 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 safety be spread around communities. It also suggested that local women’s clubs hold lectures and meetings on the care and feeding of children. Local groups might also introduce the next generation of mothers to weight and health standards through Little Mothers’ Leagues or school programming. Above all other measures, the clubwomen 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 private fundraising or by convincing the local government to allocate funds.104 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 clubwomen read child health 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 straightforward 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. 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.105
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.106 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 a 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 short-lived program might be better understood as an anomaly in the primarily advisory work of the bureau. Pamphlets, quantification, and, above all, women’s voluntary labor made the work of the Children’s Bureau 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. Height-weight charts then became popular ways for those women to measure themselves. Versions of such tables, claiming to offer medical insight, circulated in the life insurance business. They circulated in popular women’s magazines. By the early 1930s, such tables would increasingly be used to assess adult men when they came in contact with the state. In the interwar years, the majority of which did not have an active draft, the men who ended up in intimate contact with the state were commonly low-income men. As the Great Depression expanded men’s participation in social welfare programs, the physique of these men was analyzed according to the quantitative norms popularized in the 1910s and 1920s. The quantification that made these height-weight tests possible would now allow for the measurement of masses of young American men. Advisory techniques continued to guide the approach of state entities toward physique, but the specific demographics of those participating in this social welfare program also recast the boundaries of the advisory.
CHAPTER 2
Boys into Men: Depression-Era Physique in the Civilian Conservation Corps
“Have you ever seen a boy from your community leave for a CCC camp and then come home again six months or a year later?,” the Civilian Conservation Corps director asked in the pamphlet Now They Are Men. “If you have,” James McEntee continued, “you are almost certain to have seen a striking change in his physical appearance.” The young man’s posture was improved, his muscles hardened, his cheeks ruddy, and his scrawny body filled out. This boy, on average, “has gained ten or fifteen, perhaps even twenty or twenty-five pounds.”1 While designed as a social welfare program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided its aid through a literal reshaping of the male body. As one supporter explained, the opportunity to improve “physical development … will help [men] to wage a better battle for economic independence” even after they left the corps.2 Using both advisory (weigh-ins and media) and more hands-on (calisthenics and hard labor) state body projects, the CCC set out to alter the bodies and circumstances of young, low-income American boys, rehabilitating them and transforming them into breadwinning men.
For those men living in CCC camps, the corps’ body project could be coercive. Men labored, ate, slept, and exercised the CCC way. In different circumstances, such a direct, aggressive body project would have been unimaginable. For about 200,000 young men each year of the corps’ existence, though, the American body project was an astonishingly intimate one. These young men, cast by the corps as malleable boys, could be subjected to hands-on body projects ranging from mandatory calisthenics to arduous physical labor. This was because they volunteered, because they were low-income, and because the language of body shaping was sometimes actually less insulting than the language of social welfare. The CCC was domesticating these boys, in their mind, turning them from imagined bands of vagrants and multiethnic drifters into productive protobreadwinners.3
The hands-on experience was meant to reform and rehabilitate these men, to transform them from welfare clients to self-sufficient citizens. One pamphlet called The CCC Offers A Young Man a Chance argued that “enrollment in the CCC may be the best opportunity many men will ever have for building up their health and strength.”4 Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself promoted the CCC by linking health gains with employment prospects and economic recovery. He said that “the clean life and hard work in which you are engaged … cannot fail to help your physical condition.” Improved condition meant better individual and national prospects. “You should emerge from this experience, strong and rugged,” he continued, “and ready for reentrance into the ranks of industry.”5
The corps was not concerned solely with the bodies of those men