In his first round of New Deal legislation, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the creation of two major relief programs, one you've definitely heard of and the other you probably haven't. The one you've heard of, of course, is the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), started in 1933 as a public work program for young, unemployed, unmarried men from relief families. It was a popular, wildly successful program that contributed much to American parks, buildings, and roadways. This is a familiar story. The other program--the one I'm willing to bet many people haven't heard of (it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page)--is the Federal Transient Program (FTP), established as a part of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. It served largely the same purpose, but for a different group of beneficiaries: transients (or "floaters"--unattached persons who drifted on the road) of all ages. The FTP was created in the same year as the CCC, but the FTP was killed by 1935, while the CCC remained in effect until 1942. Indeed, the FTP was plagued by low public approval early on, and it did not survive the stigma attached to its program. See, the FTP was perceived from its inception as a hotbed of homosexuality--or "sex perversion"--which is something neither politicians nor the American people took too kindly to supporting with public dollars. Dr. Samuel Kahn, a widely respected psychiatrist, wrote what many Americans at this time thought: "Most fags are floaters." But, as you're about to see, homosexuality and challenges to gender roles also existed to a very large extent in the CCC.
Why, then, was the FTP a failure while the CCC thrived? That question is the subject of this diary. In the process, I hope to "queer" the New Deal welfare state by highlighting aspects that have not been touched upon much by generations of historians. Follow me below the fold.
Transients had long been associated with homosexuality and sex perversion in the early twentieth-century imagination. The idea of the hobo's "wanderlust" and rejection of normal family life in favor of male camaraderie was troubling to many Americans. Add to this the reality that many transients were so desperate for food that they performed sexual favors to obtain it. Hoboes, tramps, and vagrants were widely regarded as perverts. Up until the 1930s, however, transients could largely be ignored without much consequence. But when the Great Depression hit and the transient problem became much more exacerbated and visible, New Deal politicians realized they needed to tackle the issue.
The result was the FTP, which put transients to work for the state. But the program required a massive public relations campaign that stressed the normalcy of the "new" transient. In other words, the transient of the 1930s was a vagrant out of economic necessity, as opposed to the "old," "chronic" transients of the past. FTP officials emphasized the urgency of rescuing the new transient from the danger of being corrupted on the road and turning into a "chronic" problem. The new transient was merely a typical American down on his luck and in the grips of a cruel Depression.
All of this rhetoric on the parts of FTP officials did not change the fact that sex perversion did exist within the FTP camps. The 1934 handbook of the National Association for Travelers Aid and Transient Services, in fact, explicitly admitted that homosexual activity in the camps was to be expected. In public, FTP officials staunchly defended the purity of their camps, denying the existence of homosexuality within their gates. In private, however, they were much more resigned, and homosexuality was, in many ways, tolerated. FTP camp staff were actually more policed in this area than the camp residents. At the same time, staff were trained to be tolerant of the deviant activities they might hear about or encounter.
We know that homosexuality was an issue in the camps because of the newspapers and magazines produced by camp residents. For example, this is an illustration found in a newspaper from Camp Foster in Florida:
It doesn't get much more homoerotic than that. Significantly, one camp's rules explicitly prohibited "lounging" on another man's bed as well as excessive nudity.
Frequent reference was made in camp literature to the sexual vernacular of the road: jockers, wolves, kids, chickens, and lambs. Excerpts like this are ripe with queer sexual meaning:
Now that the big hungry WOLF [has] left the lodge who will be his successor?...Send in your answers...and receive a free ticket to a chicken dinner.
The same writer continued, possibly invoking fellatio:
Most chickens like corn. Some prefer it shelled off the cob, while others are willing to drink it right out of the bottle.
Homosexual men of this time period were well accustomed to using code. At the same time, the word "gay" was being used in American urban centers as a code word for "homosexual" (I guess the secret is out by now, huh?). One transient wrote in a personal ad:
I am a tall, handsome, and gay brute. My friends are surprised at the things I say.
Clearly, homosexuality was prevalent within the FTP camps, even though officials were quick to deny it to save their program from public scorn.
The CCC, which employed transients even if it did not admit it, had a similar sexual culture in its camps. Happy Days, the weekly resident-produced newspaper of the CCC that circulated in the camps, tells the story if you read between the lines. For example, there is this excerpt, advertising an all-male beauty contest:
For many months now, the editors of this paper have been receiving claims from the camps--first from this one, then from that one--all insisting that in "their" particular camp resides the best-looking man in the whole C.C.C....[I]f you have an Adonis in YOUR camp whom you think runs a chance of being the most handsome man in the whole C.C.C., send in his picture...Now, come on, you handsome guys, we’re ready for you.
These beauty contests were actually a common occurrence in many camps. The flagrant disregard for traditional standards of masculinity was sometimes even more explicit, though. In Napoleon, Ohio, members of Company 553 organized themselves into three groups: the "Sissies," the "Pansies," and the "Farmers." Violating the conventional rules of the gender order was, in many ways, a response to the conditions of the camp--no women were present to do the "women's work," of course, so men had to reconcile their often-emasculating labor with their roles as men. The result was images like this, found in
Happy Days:
Drag shows were also common in the camps. Cross-dressing and makeup-wearing were not untypical at all. Indeed, an entire "camp" (pun intended) culture formed in which many rural men and boys were not afraid at all to take on female roles and flaunt their femininity. All of this was tolerated, with resignation, by camp officials as well as the Roosevelt administration.
As for explicit sexuality in the CCC camps, our evidence is scarcer. However, the aforementioned 1934 National Association for Travelers Aid and Transient Services handbook which addressed homosexuality was written for both the FTP and the CCC, indicating that homosexual sex acts were also a concern in the CCC camps. This is also just common sense--if it was happening in the FTP camps, it was almost assuredly happening in the CCC camps. Additionally, if you read between the lines of Happy Days, you'll see the innuendo implying the existence of a homoerotic sexual culture in the CCC. Take this illustration, for example:
Notice the placement of the middle crossbar of the last "E." Unfortunate oversight or intentional innuendo? You decide.
What the illustration shows, however, is--at the very least--the possibility that even "masculine" activities in the CCC such as sports carried homoerotic undertones. Not to mention the obsession with bodybuilding and physique within Happy Days and other camp publications. Physical Culture, a physique magazine that was borderline-pornographic for the 1930s, was widely distributed in the camps.
Clearly, not much difference existed in the cultures of the FTP and CCC camps. But the public and political reactions were vastly different in each case. The FTP, plagued by accusations of sex perversion, was shut down by 1935. The discourse on the CCC, however, was mostly free of references to homosexuality. Why?
Well, the answer is complicated. The FTP catered to young and old transients, feeding the idea that the young were being victimized by the old, perverted hoboes. The CCC, on the other hand, targeted young men specifically. Not only that, but--even more significantly--the CCC built itself as a program that reinforced the family. Although CCC enrollees were unmarried, they were required to list at least one dependent. The FTP, on the other hand, targeted uncommitted, unsettled transients and was therefore seen as a welfare program for sex perverts rather than a training program for young, pioneering men. This is ultimately what caused the downfall of the FTP as opposed to the success of the CCC.
In a broader sense, we see in the public and governmental reaction to the FTP and CCC the beginnings of what we now know as the gay-straight binary. This binary indeed existed in the 1930s. But it was not explicitly about "homosexual" and "heterosexual." Instead, it was about transience and settlement. With time, the government and American culture at large would more explicitly target gays and lesbians. The discrimination toward transients in the 1930s was a foreshadowing of the discrimination queer people would face in the decades to follow.
Most of the above information was taken from two sources that I would recommend you check out if you want to know more about this topic. First, Colin R. Johnson's article "Camp Life: The Queer History of 'Manhood' in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1937," available in full here. Second, Margot Canaday's masterful book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, which explores not only the New Deal but also the government regulation of homosexuality in general in the early twentieth century, from the military to immigration to the welfare state. I can't recommend it enough.