This project examines how the U.S. federal government invested in and used science to create specific kinds of standards. While the focus on fitness and health seem like contemporary concerns, they actually date back to the calorie experiments of 19th century Agricultural Experiment Stations, the 1920s nutrition advice of the Home Economics Bureau, and the 1950s fitness projects of the President's Commission on Physical Fitness. Although the impact of such projects has been extraordinary, these multiple agencies and bureaus have never been understood as critical stakeholders in a continuous discussion of good citizens or fit bodies. Political historians have largely avoided the seemingly cultural domain of physique (weight, size, musculature), while cultural historians have tended to overlook the political and scientific aspects of fitness. This research offers a corrective, bringing the state's investment and the role of science in definitions of normal bodies to the fore.
This project investigates the different government agencies and types of scientific expertise and government agencies involved in changes in weight and musculature standards. The research centers on three main questions. First, how did physique become legitimized as a concern of the U.S. federal government? Second, how were decisions about physical measurements made, and how were physiological standards set? How and why did these standards change over time? Third, what were the political implications of these changing body standards? That is, did these standards simultaneously include and exclude individuals as normal citizens?
The investigators' methodology is based in extensive archival work. Documents and materials are examined through qualitative study, consisting primarily of critical textual analysis. Such historical scholarship offers insight into the complexity of state agencies and forms of scientific expertise, and provides an analytical framework to study contemporary debates about health and fitness. The project uncovers and theorizes a largely forgotten history in a way that promises to impact policy studies, anthropological and sociological studies of the body, and the history of science. It also brings attention to some understudied federal archive collections such as the Home Economics Bureau and the President's Commission on Physical Fitness. Its subject matter is of great contemporary interest, as it provides needed historical context for current debates over government intervention in American standards for weight and fitness.
Today, the federal government is regularly called to sort out the political problems of American bodies. The apparent obesity of citizens is frequently attributed to government decisions such as subsidies for the production of high fructose corn syrup and the underfunding of public school lunch programs. City, state and federal governments are nonetheless often considered the logical channels to fix the crisis, perhaps through taxes on sodas, legislation mandating calories on restaurant menus, or the banning of trans fats. First Lady Michelle Obama has taken up this public concern through her "Let's Move" initiative. The political nature of these concerns is often justified through estimated costs of obesity to Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the percentage of GDP such medical interventions represent. While opposition to these centralized health and welfare measures can be vocal, most notable is simply that concerns over body weight and physique represent a national, highly-political issue. This project uses extensive original research in archives to contextualize contemporary tensions. We examines how and why weight and physique became issues of substantial concern to the federal government, from the late 19th-century up through the present. The research, including month of work at the National Archives, the National Library of Medicine, and the archives of the National Academy of Sciences, was funded by this award and conducted by the CO-PI. The research quickly explodes the myth that government interest in weight is a product of modern "obesity epidemic" circumstances. Our research examines the transformation of the body as an object of government interest. We find that federal policy-making was critical to the federally-funded nutrition science at the turn-of the century, and to the attempts of the Bureau of Home Economics and the Children’s Bureau to increase children’s weights in the 1920s. Elements of the federal government were also at the core of the obsession with male citizens’ musculature in the Civilian Conservation Corps and up through the WWII draft, as well as its aftermath. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, long before subsidized high fructose corn syrup or White House organic gardens, weight and physique were well established federal concerns. The larger historical import of this political concern with the body rests in the approaches taken in shaping citizen bodies. I reveal agencies fascinated with what we might call a "big government" project, but save for a little experimentation in the 1930s, willing to address their concerns only through "small government" mechanisms. Policy makers relied on partnerships with public schools, civic and voluntary organizations, and, by mid-century, corporate collaboration. The research illustrates a long but limp-armed state. We argue that while wide-spread and relatively influential, the lack of financial support or legislative mandate accompanying federal programming relegated American fitness to the realm of political fantasy, not reality. As the contemporary obesity crisis threatens American health, we believe it is critical to look back at the way weight and body policy has taken shape, and the ways in which we can learn from some of these mistakes and develop stronger and more successful health programs. Last Modified: 03/26/2012 Submitted by: Rachel Moran Broader Impacts: Establishing a historical baseline for the nature and scope of the government's interest in citizen weight and physique should benefit policymakers concerned with contemporary fitness concerns (like the obesity crisis). First, this research disproves the myth that federal involvement with weight or physique is "un-American" or otherwise beyond the scope of the American state. While citizens should debate and discuss whether specific interventions are good ideas, it is critical to understand that this is a long-established area of federal interest. Given the long-standing national security and economic rationales for monitoring the citizen body, the appropriate political question seems not whether the federal government ought to be involved, but rather in what ways and to what extent. Second, the "in what ways" question needs to be answered with some historical context. The earliest 20th century body projects came out of agencies with limited political power, like the female-led Bureau of Home Economics and the Children’s Bureau. As a result of both their institutional positions, these bureaus instituted most of their prescriptive programming through voluntary and advice-based measures. Schools and public health nurses voluntarily took up the Children’s Bureau’s calls for height-weight campaigns. Government-produced health films were generally taken seriously. In the 1920s and 1930s, these federal agencies had a deeper connection with Americans than government bureaucracy does today. Once this path was set in motion, voluntary and advice-based policy-making (as opposed to move forceful policy-making) became the primary mode federal weight programming took throughout the 20th century. With so much less trust in federal bureaucracy today, as well as so many more competing sources of health and body advice, the sort of programming that worked in the first half of the 20th century has not adapted well to the early 21st century. The President’s Council on Physical Fitness or the First Lady’s Let’s Move program both continue this historical pattern of advice-giving and program-development without follow-through, enforcement, or substantial incentive, and with limited federal resource allocation. When designing new policies designed to improve Americans’ physical fitness, we must consider the context in which our policy models were designed to decide if they are still an appropriate base for contemporary fitness policy. Last Modified: 04/30/2012 Submitted by: Rachel Moran Intellectual Merits: Our research examines the development of physique as an area of government interest. We find that the state has had a long term interest in the body of citizens. The idea that the federal government has long researched and sought to regulate American bodies may seem odd, since it is not a common history. The body often seems like too intimate a terrain for political projects. This owes to the unique way in which so many of these federal body projects were undertaken. Scientific research, once translated for the public, often served as a unique sort of policy making. In general, we have found that the management of the individual American body was undertaken through advice giving and government-corporate-school partnerships. These partnerships and tactics allowed for relative freedom from regulation and large-scale critique. These program designs originated a political path for the regulation of the human body, a path which future policy would follow. The project proposed to address three major research questions: 1) How and when was physique (including weight, size, musculature) legitimized as a concern of the U.S. federal government? Our preliminary findings suggest that the origins of federal interest in physique can be traced to early 20th century attempts to strengthen the American population with a military and industrial rationale. Only during World War I were these interests truly legitimized in the eye of the public. In part this owed to WWI soldier death rates, and concerns about the health of future soldiers. More critically, this legitimization owed to the rise of the quantified body in the early 20th century. Progressive Era (1890s-1914) experts advocated for a scientific and apparently objective approach to everyday life. This included issues like health, and Progressive elements of the American Medical Association and the American Child Health Organization joined in the effort to use height and weight as signifiers of general health. As scale technology was slowly democratized in the early 20th century, the scale became a common military tool for quickly assessing soldier and potential soldier health. In response, the desire to improve future soldiers brought the scale into the public school classroom by the late 1910s and into the early 1920s. In sum: citizen physique was legitimized as a concern of the US government when strong citizen bodies seemed (a) necessary for national defense and America’s role as global economics power. The use of clean, (b) quantitative height-weight measurements made the military interest in physique easily transferable to civilian life (especially for children, with potential futures in soldiering and industry). With an apparently scientific and professional means of public measurement, height-weight concerns quietly transferred to civilian life. Last Modified: 04/30/2012 Submitted by: Rachel Moran 2) Why has quantification proven such a popular method of addressing physical concerns? Moreover, why has it proven so critical when discussing the politics of health and physique? Height-weight tables grew extraordinarily popular in the late-1910s and early-1920s. Once the tables were seemingly everywhere (doctor’s offices, public health nursing stations, women’s club meetings, classrooms), however, they were met with intense scientific and statistical scrutiny. Some of the very same statisticians who had developed such tables, like Louis Dublin, now worried that height-weight tables were inadequate tools for assessing anyone’s general health and well-being. The tables were based on limited data sets, were based only on white Americans, and generally conflated the broad idea of malnutrition with the single symptom of underweight. So how did these charts not only survive but ultimately thrive? We argue for two major reasons for the continued use of height-weight tables and related quantification in 20th century politics. First, they allowed for lay expertise. The introduction of simple tables offered opportunities for the federal Children’s Bureau to campaign for regular child weighing and measuring. The Bureau encouraged school teachers to use weighing and measuring in the classroom. Tables were easy to read and offered clear diagnoses of underweight, overweight, or normal weight. Public health workers, mothers, and teachers needed minimal training to understand them. With charts in hand, however, these "lay women" were transformed into authorities on child health and wellness, with diagnostic powers. The extensive use of charts bolstered the rhetoric of maternal politics by bolstering them with scientific authority. Ultimately, these charts would become part of the growing pediatric profession, and in turn the women who had once been empowered by them would lose any special relationship to the tables that they had in the 1920s and 1930s. Experts who worried about chart limits hoped that making them more of a doctor’s tool than a lay tool would minimize the problems of charts by having a second, expert opinion ready. In their heyday, though, millions of women learned to read and trust charts. These women and their children also learned to closely associate weight with health, and to value knowing their weight in a way no previous generation had. While reason one explains how a federal agency (the Children’s Bureau) helped convince Americans that weight and weight tables were medically useful. The second reason, then, helps explain the institutional uses of height-weight. In the 1910s and 1920s, there was some federal investment in height-weight (related to child mortality, for example), but the agency most interested was a peripheral one. Increasing individual and community concern over height-weight was in the interest of the state, but the state was not especially interested in undertaking this monitoring itself (certainly not on a large scale, or for adults). This changed as large numbers of Americans entered the employ of the growing bureaucratic and welfare state in the 1930s. It changed even more dramatically as Americans were drafted into the armed forces in large numbers by the early 1940s. Once a large population of poor, young, often unhealthy men was brought to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the early 1930s, these men’s bodies took on new political import. Improving their bodies helped to politically sell this welfare program. As men worked in the forests for federal pay, most grew larger and gained muscle. Men were weighed somewhat regularly at the camps, and their gains in weight were used as quantifiable (and thus incontrovertible) proof of the program’s benefits. Franklin D. Roosevelt himself praised the average eleven pounds men gained while working in the CCC. These pounds proved especially important as the nation prepared for American entry into World War II. The new Selective Service System drafted an unprecedented number of American men. In peace time, men received their army physical examination when they showed up at the induction station. In WWII, with millions of men to examine, the Selective Service System introduced a middle step in which local civilian doctors screened local draftees before sending them to the induction stations for further examination. For efficient and standardized screenings, the Selective Service relied on height-weight charts as an important part of these preliminary screenings. Once again, height-weight was validated as a critical measure of health. In these cases, moreover, height-weight tables were instrumentalized as useful tools for political power and bureaucratic management. Last Modified: 04/30/2012 Submitted by: Rachel Moran 3) In what ways and at which moments have the interest of the U.S. state in weight and physique – "the state’s gaze" if you will – changed the meanings of the physical body? Given the complexity of the issue, we have no one answer to this question. There is not a simple narrative or a single agency responsible for federal interest in weight and physique. Weight-oriented projects have had different effects, which have been dependent of historical context as well as the specific agency and political actors at work. We are still at search for larger patterns, but the history seems too complicated for one theory. That said, the most critical finding has been how powerfully internal and personal governance has been to implementing larger public and political projects. In the intimate arena of physique, Americans as a whole have resisted large scale government directives. State agencies could be their most directive when it came to defense and welfare programs, but even then there were limits to what could be asked of citizens, and to how (and if) it might be enforced. As a result, a regular theme in federal programs has been the use of voluntary and semi-voluntary labor (as well as non-governmental resources) to implement governmental programming. In the case of Children’s Bureau in the 1920s, for instance, the Bureau had nowhere near the resources to spread its advice on child health on its own. This meant it used several other methods to address the issue. It (1) focused on an "awareness" message over an active solution to health problems, (2) used tools like height-weight tables to make its program free and widely available and most critically (3), the enlistment of unpaid volunteers, especially women, as arms of the state. Mothers, teachers, nurses, and journalists (at least up through the 1950s) generally accepted the medical advice offered from agencies like the Bureau. They used its free resources. They wrote letters to the Bureau for further information and generally received friendly but serious replies. They brought their babies to local "child health conferences," organized by local organizations relying on Bureau guidance. In different ways throughout the first half of the century, Americans not only accepted but also took responsibility for body politics. This arrangement had automatic limitations: there could be no mandates nor enforcement of recommendations, and the state rarely provided direct financial resources to the people who were actually tasked with the programming. None the less, federal ideas about physique and weight were spread throughout the nation, all throughout the 20th century. Moreover, Americans complied. Most were not active organizers. In fact, most do not seem to have consciously thought of themselves as "complying" or even participating in federal politics as they weighed themselves and their children, read weight tables in books and magazines, bought a scale, or began to subtly conflate weight and health. Even as they went about their daily business, though, these men and women were quietly taking part in projects that supported state desires.
