Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives by Holly Allen (review)

During the Great Depression, images of the unemployed—on bread lines, in transient camps, and in protest—fueled social anxieties about the loss of virility and power that threatened to erode the will to work, the structure of the family, and even the American republic. Addressing the needs of these “forgotten men” would, by contrast, shore up the American economy and regenerate its democracy. In this story, told frequently by administrators, journalists, and elected officials during the 1930s, saving unemployed white workingmen would have a salutary effect on all Americans. It would lead, naturally, to the restoration of civic and cultural life as well as collective and individual morality. Capturing these stories of forgotten men and women is the mission of historian Holly Allen’s new book, Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives. Allen explores a handful of government agencies charged with employing the unemployed and with civilian defense and the rhetorical strategies used to promote and defend them in the Depression decade and during World War II. Allen’s brief is that the New Deal privileged white men over women and minorities and used narrative strategies that elevated the one and scapegoated the others in its efforts to secure the modern welfare state.

Studies of the two-tiered welfare state, structured through gender difference and racial discrimination, support such contentions. Indeed, Allen’s story is not unfamiliar. The New Deal’s bromance with muscular Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) youth and ripped union workers has been covered before. What Allen provides is a detailed exploration of how specific New Deal agencies manipulated stories of emasculated workers and regenerated masculinity in an effort to silence critics of programs like the CCC, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the wartime Office of Civilian Defense. New Dealers offered up instead the marginal programs targeting white women and minorities when charges of government waste or congressional budget cuts loomed. The scapegoating of what Allen calls “the pantry-snooping” social worker, the married working woman, the sexually promiscuous woman adrift, and the African American mother and Mexican American man who were slackers on the government payroll was the strategy not only of the New Deal’s political opponents but of its wary and often conservative administrators (18, 116–18). Close down the sewing rooms and send the black woman to pick beans in the fields, but be sure to protect the bridge project. The value of public works projects certainly helped the Roosevelt administration’s argument, but charges of corruption and inefficiency, not to mention political influence, emerged for partisan reasons. They were not confined to the programs that benefited women workers and minorities.

Allen has located her study at the critical intersection where the history of the welfare state meets the history of gender and sexuality. Following in the footsteps of such scholars as Margot Canaday, Neil Maher, and Lauren Berlant, she explores the cultural narratives that served to support the New Deal’s political innovations. Growing public acceptance of federal government intervention in the forms of work relief, civilian defense, or the internment and relocation of Japanese Americans in large part depended on these narratives. Allen perceptively analyzes how certain comforting narratives bolstered government support and revenue for those programs targeting white workingmen, whose family breadwinner status was assumed and who by the late 1930s were citizens and thus potential military recruits.

One chapter that stands out above the rest addresses the CCC, which had a bumpy start but eventually helped to employ hundreds of thousands of youth on work projects. While conservation, work experience, and family support were the CCC’s main goals, Allen connects this mission with a more subversive and subconscious one—addressing social panics about juvenile delinquency, sex, and youth alienation from the wage labor force. Allen’s colorful quotes about fears that youth would be perverted by older men and made sexually subordinate stand side...