"Builder of Men": Homosociality and the Nationalist Accents of the Civilian Conservation Corps

During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps intervened to safeguard masculine youth against the potentially dire effects of prolonged social dislocation.  It removed impressionable youth from "the perils of the streetcorner" to the rugged, healthful surrounds of the Army-supervised wilderness camp.  There, in an environment of carefully-monitored, partially militarized fraternal living, enrollees learned habits of discipline and regularity; they partook of "democracy in action"; and they internalized the social values of mutualism, cooperation, and compromise that membership in a fraternal community was uniquely suited to provide. The CCC also linked the nation's most vital human resource -- its white, masculine youth -- and its most inspiring physical resources -- its plains, mountains, streams, and lakes.  In New Deal rhetoric, the nation's physical landscape and its jobless youth became metaphors for national crisis.  Both had been sickened by the immense growth of urban communities, with their problems of congestion, poverty, and crime. Roosevelt's invocations of "America, the beautiful," restored to former greatness by the CCC "loosely clad foresters," convinced many Americans of the effectiveness of the New Deal. But public fascination with the CCC’s “loosely-clad forestry workers” also reflected the sexual pleasures and dangers that Americans associated with “wandering youth” in the Depression. Erotically charged descriptions of needy masculine youth, restored to vigor as improvers of the nation's wilderness, also help to account for the agency’s immense popularity.