Whereas the New Deal is seen to mark a transformative moment in American political development, by paying attention to its underlying civic narratives, Holly Allen in Forgotten Men and Fallen Women reveals the extent to which state expansion was also preservationist, anchoring longstanding and newer civic ideals onto the emergent New Deal state. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing focus on civic identities in American political development (APD), and the important role of racial and gendered ideational narratives in shaping American State-building (Rogers Smith, Politics of Peoplehood: the Role of Values, Interests, and Identities, 2015, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, 1997, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership, 2003); Julie Novkov and Carol Nackenoff, eds., Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, 2014; Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman eds., Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, 2007).
Allen assembles Depression and World War II civic narratives centered on figures such as the “forgotten man,” “fallen woman,” “citizen soldier,” and “civilian defender” and argues that these were deployed by federal officials to enlist popular support for the expansive New Deal state and for World War II programs. In six substantive chapters, she demonstrates the intertwining of the institutional histories of vital federal programs and their evolving civic narratives. She maps, for instance, the history of relief agencies during the Depression onto the discursive deployment (and evolution) of the “forgotten man” as a political figure by state actors. In addition to program formation, the book is strong in revealing how also the practices of state programs embodied and pivoted on civic narratives—for example, in structuring the location, design, and routine of Civilian Conservation Corps’ (CCC) militaristic wilderness camps and transient camps under the Federal Transient Program (FTP).
The book purports to highlight the importance of civic stories in at least three ways (pp. 1–2): (a) as illustrations of the “gender and racial contours of U.S. civic culture” in the New Deal and World War II eras; (b) as discursive mechanisms by which state builders soothe “tension between residual and emergent sources of civic authority” by offering “affective assurance” to mobilize support for state programs (p. 3, 6); and (c) as the “crucial means through which ordinary people understand their place within systems of national political power” (p. 2). It accomplishes the first two more effectively than the third.
The book is convincing in its demonstration of the significance of race, gender, and sexuality in the construction of New Deal civic narratives and the juxtaposition of new, more liberal political ideals, alongside older, illiberal, ones. It is also effective in highlighting the importance of emotions in politics, as the means through which state narratives draw popular support for public programs. We see how politically successful civic narratives, such as the “forgotten man,” “civilian protectors,” and “citizen soldiers” were those that generated widespread affective satisfaction, often by scapegoating women and racial and sexual minorities which, in turn, engendered mass support for unprecedented programs of state expansion.
Although uneven across the chapters, the overall focus on affect in policymaking contributes an important, often overlooked, dimension to our understanding of ideas in policy and political development, suggesting that the affective capacity of certain ideas may be vital to their overarching policy relevance. Emotions are a possible bridge between liberal and illiberal impulses in structuring political development, connecting, what Rogers Smith has identified (Stories of Peoplehood, 2003) as backwards-looking (ascriptive-based) collective narratives to progressive policies. Individual emotions, such as “nostalgia,” “passion,” “courage,” and “fear” have recently been the focus of several important works in political development and history (Ira Katzenelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), Richard Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryant and the 1896 Democratic Convention, 2008; Laura Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938, 2007) and although she does not identify this literature, Allen’s book directly contributes to this scholarship.
However, it is less clear how everyday people interact with prevailing civic narratives to “understand their place” within the political system. Despite attention to popular and counter-narratives, the centrality of government sources—government pamphlets, publicity campaign materials, program records, reports, press releases, and committee hearings—underscores the book’s state-centeredness. Also dynamics linking state and society discourses are often not evidenced.
Furthermore, each chapter’s civic narrative figure (and its associated institutional embedment) is presented more as an independent ideal, leaving one to wonder how and if the substance of one shaped another. How did the forgotten man or fallen woman of New Deal relief programs impact, if at all, the narrative of civilian protectors and associated OCD programs during World War II? Allen does better at highlighting interconnections across programs—for example, in the continuing strategies of scapegoating and adoption of racial and gendered claims of citizenship in the War Relocation Authority, as similar to those harnessed in the CCC during the Depression (pp. 176–177). However, the legacies or impact of the central ideational figures themselves across varied narratives are less attended to.
Family is an important connecting thread shaping the identified civic narratives and their ideals throughout - structuring citizenship, mobilizing affective popular support, and embedding racial, gender, and sexual inequalities in programmatic targets, benefits, and regulations. It is discussed sporadically but deserves more consistent prominence. Family ideals underpin several of the civic stories discussed, such as in the idealization of white male family breadwinners in narratives of forgotten men, anxieties over transient perverts, and valorization of Civilian Protectors (Chapters 1, 2, 5), or also in castigation of nagging wives, married women workers, and female promiscuity in “woman-blaming narratives” (Chapter 4). In this regard, the book misses several opportunities to directly engage with seminal works pertaining to family in and about this era (Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 1999; Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy, 1998; Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, 2006). By paying attention to family as a central organizing heuristic, ideational continuities and change from one civic figure to the next could be more prominently displayed.
On the other hand, gender is another permeating feature that is well highlighted, dividing citizenship and civic stories over time and also, perhaps, shaping the format of the book. The “forgotten man,” “transient pervert,” and “citizen soldier” (Chapters 1, 2 3) are presented as singular, male civic narratives that are targeted by distinct programs and discussed in individual chapters. However, feminine (negative) civic figures—such as “pantry snooper” (social worker), “meddlesome wives,” “married women workers,” or promiscuous female transients and/or prostitutes—are presented more broadly, less targeted by single programs, and discussed across multiple chapters, many of which are combined in Chapter 4’s treatment of Woman-Blaming Narratives.
With regard to race, in most of the book the central civic story identified is presented as one constructed around a white (male or female) subject, whose whiteness Allen then meticulously demonstrates, also revealing how these narratives operated unequally, and discriminatorily, for African Americans and to a lesser extent for Mexican Americans (example OCD, p. 147). In this way illiberalism, or the non-white subject, appears to be far less of a central, formative force for state-building than liberalism or the white subject. However, Chapter 6 is a welcome exception and assembles a non-white civic narrative and thus demonstrates the formative impact of (also) non-white civic figures on national programs. Through the chapter’s analysis of Nisei loyal citizen soldiers and Kebei disloyal troublemakers, racially-specific Japanese-American masculine figures are shown to permeate the War Relocation Authority efforts, most directly illustrating the relevance of non-white civic narratives to nation-building. Here non-white civic figures appear not merely as overlooked dimensions of an otherwise white liberalizing state, but as central characters in an illiberal civic story.
In sum, the book is well written, rich in descriptive prose and discourse analysis and, although minimalist in its references to relevant literature, it would directly appeal to three sets of audiences: (a) historians, legal scholars, and political scientists with interests in the family, gender, and race and their collective impact on policy; (b) those interested in the role of emotions (and culture) in politics and policymaking; and (c), American political development scholars focused on civic ideals and their significance to state-building.
