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In 1931, few could imagine federal intervention in the new machinemade leisure, even if they could see its potential to rebuild the defeated nation. Concerned about the peril of this new leisure on the laboring classes, journalist Ralph Aiken of the North American Review discussed the double-edged view of leisure, where “likelihood is that those who lose their jobs to machinery will form a large class of parasites and accomplish nothing but degeneracy in their idleness,” even though leisure was a “golden opportunity if the unemployed are now and in the future tactfully encouraged and inXuenced.” Yet workers, “moping in breadlines and on street corners,” were not visibly taking up the chance to use their “golden hours in the pursuit of learning,” and government along with other authorities had a responsibility to make workers utilize their free time in ways proWtable to both the individual and the nation. How this was to be done left Aiken wondering, for “people cannot be driven” in a democratic nation and so the possibility of making the unemployed use their minds remained in the realms of fantasy: “Can we imagine a system of doles wherein the recipient must be required to exhibit some intellectual proWciency or some crude work of art before he may receive his subsistence from the government? We can imagine it, but that is about all.”1 Anxiety over the new leisure problem had reached fever pitch by the time Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. As reports and statistics had shown, the solution to the problem of leisure could be found in federal control: “Another problem . . . is the devising of ways and means of better governmental supervision and control of commercial amusements. This involves suitable measures of control over motion pictures and radio broadcasting, and the regulation of dance halls, pool and billiard rooms, cabarets and road houses, burlesque theaters, horse-racing and other forms of amusement provided on a commercial basis.”2 In the summer of 1932, however, economic and social control appeared lost as more than twenty-thousand destitute war veterans assembled in Washington, D.C., to demand early payment of their army service bonuses. These “bonus marchers” became symbols of modern Chapter 2 Preparing for Spare Time America’s “Forgotten Man.” Veterans of a war where technology turned machines into mass murderers, the men had returned to a world where machinery had apparently rendered them useless and unemployed. As these anxieties began to show, the problem of leisure also became a problem of changing gender roles. On the one hand, because traditional femininity had become inscribed with an ideology of idleness and nonwork , men now appeared emasculated by worklessness.3 On the other hand, the very technologies of mass production appeared to have weakened the male as the primary producer; the “rudderless” American male could clearly be equated with the “rudderless” nation. Men displaced by machinery were visible everywhere, on the roadside, in soup kitchens, and stooping in breadlines. These widespread images of idle men conWrmed the specter of revolution, middle-class job insecurity, and lack of political direction. Fears that modern Fordist methods of production had emasculated workers paralleled the fear that the traditional authority of the patriarch was in decline. These fears were paramount in the crusade to purify recreation and create a “stronger” race of people who could physically and mentally bring the country out of the Depression. The need for strong leadership, a “rudder” to steer the aimless ship, appeared paramount to the survival of America as a powerful economy. The Forgotten Man thus became the symbol of the decade, a human victim of the waste that technology, war, and capitalism had created. “Unproductive” leisure, then, had by the 1930s escalated into a crisis of the highest order, where moral issues surrounding free time were pathologized into a disease that was manifested in the body and stoop of the Forgotten Man.4 Franklin Roosevelt, in his radio address of April 1932, claimed that organizing for the needs of the Forgotten Man in the Depression was parallel to the organization of troops during the Wrst world war: “It is high time to admit with courage that we are in the midst of an emergency at least equal to that of war. Let us mobilize to meet it.”5 American intellectuals and social scientists pointed to the nation’s free market economy as the primary cause of the economic catastrophe that had occurred. Fissures appeared in the Fordist dream of American welfare capitalism, leaving...

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