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MICHAEL J. LANSING
'salvaging the man power of
AMERICA':
CONSERVATION, MANHOOD, AND DISABLED VETERANS DURING WORLD WAR I
ABSTRACT
Progressive-era conservationists envisioned the physical energy exerted by male bodies as a natural resource. As a result, foresters and rehabilitationists attempted to simultaneously conserve trees and manpower by using wooden prosthetics and vocational training in forestry to reconstruct the bodies of disabled World War I veterans and place them in forest work. Though they mostly failed, their efforts suggest the need for reconsidering the make-up of the conservation movement, the objects of its labors, and potential intersections for environmental and gender history.
| IN DECEMBER 1918, W. M. Hussie, of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men in New York City, appealed to readers of American Forestry to make space in their profession for returning American soldiers incapacitated by war injuries. Situating himself firmly among those who believed in the "organized effort simultaneously to put our own factory conditions and some of our disabled soldiers on a sound and healthy basis," Hussie argued that "it is high time we Americans make an examination of the possibilities of educating certain of our war disabled men to bear their part in the actual work of afforestation ... if we are to provide for the requirements of the future." As for the physical rigors of forestry, he drew on the insights of amputees and recognized that "it has become a matter of delicacy to hint that a man, however badly impaired, is useless in out of door employment." Addressing this worry, Hussie argued that veterans using the appropriate prosthetics "have proved their ability to hold their own, day after day, and to do efficient work, and receive full wages for the work done." |
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According to Hussie, rational planning and training could make up for and even seize on an opportunity provided by the destructive and irrational nature of modern warfare. Transformative work for men with prosthetics could help foresters do a better job of conserving the trees whose rational use they hoped to sustain for the sake of the nation. After all, he maintained, "an American re-education combining such training, with widening opportunities for its application ... should help in extending the work of national conservation, thus proving of tremendous value not only to our returned disabled soldiers but to the nation." The bodily energies of injured veterans, rightly restored by conservation-oriented rehabilitationists, could then be brought to bear on forest conservation. Furthermore, the physical, outdoor work involved in forestry would help veterans garner manhood. Indeed, forests, long a site for Anglo men to situate and create manliness, offered one of the most obvious venues for rehabilitating veterans' bodies, and in turn, their masculinity. The nation—as well as the veterans—would be better for it. Finally, Hussie's appeal to foresters touched on their concern over potential timber famine. He strategically reminded American Forestry's readers that "our forests need rehabilitating quite as much as our permanently disabled soldiers."1 In doing so, Hussie linked the conservation of forests and the conservation of male energy embodied in disabled veterans. |
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As the machinery of war wreaked havoc with the bodies of American soldiers in 1917 and 1918, those who worked to rehabilitate disabled soldiers built on their existing relationship with foresters—which turned on the importance of wood in prosthetic technologies and a shared commitment to conservation—to envision forestry as one of many forms of labor that might be well served by veterans equipped with up-to-date prosthetics. In turn, American foresters advocating for carefully managed forests eagerly imagined possibilities for the rehabilitation of injured veterans in a variety of occupations and programs. Middle-class foresters and rehabilitationists, bound together by Taylorist thinking and conservation ideologies, envisioned bodily energies as a natural resource and promoted their exertion in the service of scientific forestry. In the process, male bodies became a site of conservation politics. Yet for those ex-soldiers from the working class whose damaged bodies made manifest the brutality of modern warfare, conservation planning and programs only produced bureaucratic obstacles to their return to physical labor, its correspondent manhood, and the place for laboring men in an industrial society. |
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