During the Great Depression and into the war years, the Roosevelt administration sought to transform the political, institutional, and social contours of the United States. One result of the New Deal was the emergence and deployment of a novel set of narratives—reflected in social scientific case studies, government documents, and popular media—meant to reorient relationships among gender, race, sexuality, and national political power. This book focuses on the interplay of popular and official narratives of forgotten manhood, fallen womanhood, and other social and moral archetypes. It explores ... More

During the Great Depression and into the war years, the Roosevelt administration sought to transform the political, institutional, and social contours of the United States. One result of the New Deal was the emergence and deployment of a novel set of narratives—reflected in social scientific case studies, government documents, and popular media—meant to reorient relationships among gender, race, sexuality, and national political power. This book focuses on the interplay of popular and official narratives of forgotten manhood, fallen womanhood, and other social and moral archetypes. It explores how federal officials used stories of collective civic identity to enlist popular support for the expansive New Deal state and, later, for the war effort. These stories, the book argues, had practical consequences for federal relief politics. The forgotten man, identified by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a fireside chat in 1932, for instance, was a compelling figure of collective civic identity and the counterpart to the white, male breadwinner who was the prime beneficiary of New Deal relief programs. During World War II, federal policies and programs continued to be shaped by specific gendered stories—most centrally, the story of the heroic white civilian defender, which animated the Office of Civilian Defense, and the story of the sacrificial Nisei (Japanese-American) soldier, which was used by the War Relocation Authority. The Roosevelt administration's engagement with such widely circulating narratives, the book concludes, highlights the affective dimensions of U.S. citizenship and state formation.