"Building Men and Women to Live": Health, Citizenship, and American Nationalism in the Wartime 4-H

This paper examines the interlocking discourses of “health” and “citizenship” in 4-H Club programming during the Second World War to explain how particular concepts of political citizenship inflect and produce particular types of bodies.  During the Second World War, an average of one and a half million rural American youth enrolled every year in USDA-organized agricultural clubs, known popularly as 4-H clubs. 4-H clubs educated their participants about far more than just agricultural techniques.  4-H youth were obliged to maintain healthy bodies, as General Lewis B. Hershey, Director of the Selective Service Administration, told the National 4-H Encampment, capable of “participat[ing] in everything that their country requires.”  In need of able-bodies to replace the millions of farm laborers who had enlisted in the war effort, the USDA actively conflated “good health” and “good citizenship” in 4-H material, rendered the practiced cultivation of the body into a patriotic imperative, and sharpened the biopolitical strategies of the federal state by connecting the “fitness” of rural youth to wartime nationalist discourses.  Because those nationalist discourses developed in dialogue with the specter of dangerous “alien” political ideologies, healthy 4-Hers embodied the superiority of wholesome “democratic” living. When juxtaposed against the famine and disease that racked much of the world in the aftermath of the war, the health and vigor of the 4-H body made an implicit case for American global hegemony.