La Salud Mental en el IGSS

The body is . . . a mirror of our hopes and fears, our needs and desires.

—Robert L. Griswold (1998, 339)

Athletics and a masculinizing school firmly legitimate the reign of white hegemonic masculinity, with its dominance

of girls, students of color, and less-masculine boys.

—Nancy Lesko (2001, 179)

Desire has a powerful influence upon intellectual beliefs.

—John Dewey (1962 [1934], 22)

In this section I report the research of Robert L. Griswold (1998), scholarship which makes clear the gender politics underwriting the national curriculum reform movement in the 1960s. In particular, Griswold’s insightful review of the Kennedy Administration’s emphasis upon the body—especially, I argue, the young white male body—discloses how Cold War anxieties were grafted onto the bodies of the young. That “grafting” not only expressed a general- ized worry over the fate of the nation. It expressed as well, through innuendo, that women—mothers and schoolteachers—were blameworthy in allowing American youth, specifically white male youth, to go “soft.”

Such a characterization recalls centuries-long male anxieties over women’s “threat” to boys’ maturation into men, both in the school (where, for in- stance, in the late 19th century, debates raged over coeducation animated by fears that not only that boys would be softened, but that girls would be

masculinized, threatening the “natural” order of gender and sexuality) and in the home (where father’s absence and mothers’ tendencies toward over- protection presumably risked feminized boys).

In the United States, this ongoing concern for manhood has been ra- cialized as well. What historians—not without controversy (see Carnes and Griffen 1990)—have characterized as the “crisis of masculinity” has oc- curred, in part, in reaction, to civil rights successes of African Americans (see Pinar 2001; Savran 1998). In 1960, with the Soviets in space and the fate of the nation at hand, once again “gender and race [would] conflate in a crisis” (Gates 1996, 84).

These gendered and racialized conflations of mind and body, of physical and intellectual well-being, became focused as (white) men’s worries over young (white) men’s bodies, at the same time sublimated into concerns for “rigorous” schooling: the 1960s national curriculum reform movement. While never explicitly racialized, as Griswold’s account indicates, one can surmise that the Kennedy Administration’s campaign for physical fitness was not concerned over the physical condition of young black men’s bodies. Those bodies—given the aggressivity of black student activism, not to men- tion the continuing white fear of black male rape—seemed to many Euro- pean Americans hard enough.

Griswold (1998) cites John F. Kennedy’s “The Soft American,” which ap- peared in the December 26, 1960, issue of Sports Illustrated, as the beginning of the President-elect’s campaign to persuade Americans to become physi- cally vigorous. Christopher Lasch (1978, 101) found Kennedy’s pronounce- ments on physical fitness “tiresome.” Kennedy invoked standardized tests to “prove” the presumably dramatic decline of strength and fitness among American (white, especially male) youth. “Our growing softness, our increas- ing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security” (quoted in Lasch 1978, 101). Did he mean “psychological” as well as “national” security?

Kennedy praised the ancient Greeks’ conviction (but not their sexual pref- erences) that physical excellence and athletic skill were “among the prime foundations of a vigorous state” and suggested that intellectual ability could not be separated from physical well-being (quoted in Griswold 1998, 323). This restatement of 19th-century “faculty psychology”—namely, that the mind was a muscle—left Kennedy worried over the state of young Ameri- cans’ minds, as their bodies were, presumably, in terrible shape: “A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school,” wrote Kennedy, “will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 323). The future of America was imperiled by a military/space race in which the Soviets, by virtue of the 1957 Sputnik launching, had moved ahead. Intensifying the nation’s crisis, Kennedy worried, was the flabby condition of American youth, especially American boys (Griswold 1998). Especially, I would add, white boys.

With the Sports Illustrated article, Kennedy and his new administration launched a school-based program that soon had millions of children exercis- ing the prescribed minimum of 15 minutes per day. Many took a battery of tests that stretched abdominals, flexed biceps, and challenged lung capacity in the 600-yard run. What was at stake? Was Kennedy only concerned about physical fitness? Griswold (1998) suggests that embedded in the fitness cam- paign were anxieties over morality, postwar consumerism, masculinity, and the survival of the nation itself. Griswold quotes Kennedy, who once again restates the conflation of mind and body:

We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physi- cal toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend. (quoted in Griswold 1998, 323)

The concepts—freedom, toughness, courage—are, Griswold notes, classic Kennedy rhetoric. Kennedy had molded his own body on the playing fields of Hyannisport, Choate, and Harvard, had tested it in World War II in the Solomon Islands. In his Sports Illustrated essay, Kennedy pointed out that young men in America had always been willing and able to fight for freedom but, he warned, that the strength and stamina needed for battle did not come of their own: “These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity.” He warned that “our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security” (quoted passages in Griswold 1998, 324). While Ken- nedy may have been thinking only of the Soviet “menace to our security,” for especially white male southern listeners, that phrase—“menace to our secu- rity”—reverberated as a racial threat as well.

In the fitness crusade of the Kennedy administration, the bodies of young white men—schoolboys specifically—became the “repository” (Griswold 1998, 352) for anxieties about the Cold War. The obsession with physical fit- ness was about, Griswold (1998, 235) asserts, “redeeming manhood.” Griswold focuses on manhood because, although the fitness campaign in- cluded both boys and girls, it emphasized boys. Why?

The answer, Griswold suggests, has to do with the historical moment. He points out that the 1960s physical fitness movement occurred during a period of considerable and, I would add, ongoing (see Pinar 2001, 1139–1152) cul- tural anxiety regarding the status and future of American manhood. Psychi- atric disorders associated with World War II, lingering anxieties about the absence of fathers during that war and the Korean conflict and postwar ad- justment problems of veterans were all on the public mind. These anxieties became racialized in the mid-1960s in the Moynihan Report, which diag-

nosed racial disadvantage and educational underachievement specifically as functions of absent black fathers (see Pinar 2001, 889–895). Despite the “do- mestic revival” of the 1950s—in which father-led, heteronormative families were, for many, the only option—many men worried about what they imag- ined to be overly protective mothers, who, they feared, were rendering Amer- ican manhood impotent (see Pinar 2001, 895–899). Feminized boys and men seemed an imminent danger (Griswold 1998).

The 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexuality, Griswold reminds, had shocked many Americans with its report of widespread homosexuality. In the 1950s the homosexual “menace” terrified not only parents but politicians as well. The McCarthy witch-hunt for Communists targeted not only “gender inverts” but also “egg-sucking phony liberals,” East Coast intellectuals, and emasculated “pinks, punks, and perverts.” The United States government had been infiltrated, in the words of one of McCarthy’s aides, had become “a veritable nest of Communists, fellow travelers, homosexuals, effete Ivy League intellectuals and traitors” (quoted phrases in Griswold 1998, 325). In the grip of such gendered panic, a sex-crimes panic swept America in the late 1940s and early 1950s, reaching even into “the heartland” in the infamous “boys of Boise” scandal (Gerassi 1966). Even comic books—especially “Bat- man and Robin”—posed, presumably, a threat to young “red-blooded” American boys (see Torres 1996; Wertham 1953/1954).

Press reports were lurid and widespread. Outraged citizens and terrified parents held mass meetings, security programs at schools were beefed-up, and in 15 states government commissions were established to study the threat to children posed by “sexual degenerates” (Griswold 1998, 326). Many psy- chiatrists and government officials criticized overbearing mothers and pas- sive fathers as the root of the problem and pleaded with teachers, clergymen, and police to watch for boys who were becoming effeminate. Conflating ef- feminacy with homosexuality and assuming that both were spread like STD’s, suspicious boys should be directed to guidance centers for psychiatric counseling (Griswold 1998). Right-wing fanatics in America might have been surprised to learn that the Communist Fidel Castro was also worrying about the masculinity of young men, sending effeminate Cuban boys to “camps” for gender reprogramming (Leiner 1994, 28–29).

Animating American paranoia, Griswold suggests, was the Cold War it- self, specifically the anxiety that a military encounter with the Soviet Union was inevitable. A series of gendered terms was commonly used to describe the crisis: “brinksmanship,” “massive retaliation,” and “flexible response” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 326). The fitness campaign occurred within this general panic; it was an effort to rescue manhood by rescuing the body; to teach boys, as one participant put it, to use the body in “forceful and space- occupying ways” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 326). It would also seem to offer a strategy for sublimating an evidently omnipresent homosexual desire, as

sublimated “hard” bodies were imagined as prerequisites to the development of “normal” male identity (Griswold 1998). Programs of physical fitness con- flated bodies with minds, and in so doing, would reinvigorate “manhood” so that “we” would defeat the Communist threat to national survival. The threat could not be met with “soft bodies” (Griswold 1998, 326).

The Cold War stimulated numerous anxieties, nearly all of which, Griswold (1998, 326) emphasizes, found their way onto the “bodies of the young.” Among these were materialism, conformity, maternal overprotection, parental neglect, government paternalism, moral corruption, and sexual excess, most notoriously expressed in the appearance of the “beats,” “rebels without a cause” (Savran 1998), even “the white negro” (Mailer 1957). The consequence was an America “at risk,” although that phrase would not be used for another 30 years, and then used to allege “malpractice” in the nation’s public schools (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983).

That national security was at stake was a point made by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in a speech in January 1961 at the “Coach of the Year Dinner” in Pittsburgh. Kennedy asserted that since the end of World War II—a war in which “we had proved we had the mental genius, the moral certi- tude and the physical strength to endure and conquer”—America had been on a precipitous downward moral and physical slide” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 330). Like his brother, Robert Kennedy saw a direct correlation be- tween this national decline and the softening of the (white male) body. Saving the nation, Kennedy seemed to imply, was up to the coaches. It was these older men who could “exert a tremendous influence for good in this coun- try. . . . You, who participate in football, who have played well and have trained others to play well, symbolize the needs of the Nation” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 330).

Robert Kennedy’s reference to football was no accident, Griswold points out, as it disclosed the administration’s focus upon the bodies of boys and young men. Given a pervasive fear about the state of American manhood throughout the postwar years, a rough sport like football—Oscar Wilde (quoted in Simpson 1994, 90) once quipped that “football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but it is hardly suitable for delicate boys”—reproduced a gendered hierarchy of that elevated the muscular athlete over the limp- wristed sissy-boy, the (straight) stud linebacker over the gay artist (Griswold 1998). Physical force and toughness were combined to reproduce what gen- der theorists have termed “hegemonic masculinity” secured by “the hetero- sexual matrix” (Butler 1990, 1993; Disch and Kane 1996; Silverman 1992). In this gender system men presumably project strength, power, aggressiveness, morality, and superiority while “inferiorizing the other,” that is, women and less manly men (Griswold 1998, 331).

Historically, American football has functioned to forge male solidarity around a beleaguered ideal of sovereign and powerful masculinity (see Lesko

2000; Pronger 1990). One hundred years ago masculinity was widely per- ceived to be in “crisis” (Carnes and Griffen 1990; Filene 1998). Michael Kimmel (1990, 57) has argued that the emergence of the sport in the late 19th century was prompted by a “perceived crisis of masculinity” among white middle-class males whose illusions of manly character and autonomy were compromised by profound political, economic, and gender shifts. Then the “crisis” was precipitated by the closing of the American frontier, by the mechanization and routinization of labor that erased economic individualism and autonomy (except for a few robber barons), by black political progress, by the rise of the women’s movement (secular as well as Christian feminism and the campaign for women’s suffrage), by the massive influx of immigrants into the industrial centers of the United States, by the end of “romantic” friendship and the appearance of “homosexuality” (see Pinar 2001, chapter 6). In the 1960s, it was the Cold War from which radiated a multitude of gendered, racialized, and educational anxieties.

In the 1960s physical fitness crusades and the process of “inferiorizing the other” were expressed in gendered terms. Griswold points out that sports and exercise had different meanings for girls and boys, at least in the minds of fit- ness advocates. For boys, fitness leaders emphasized competition (i.e., win- ning the game, running the fastest, completing the most sit-ups). For girls, ex- perts emphasized friendship, health, and becoming sexually appealing to boys. Griswold (1998, 331) cites Dr. Benjamin Spock’s public doubts about the appropriateness of competitive sports for girls. Sports were “really in- vented by boys, for boys.” If add the modifier “straight,” queer theorists would agree, if for different reasons: “It might be argued that with their ho- mosexuality completely (or mostly) desublimated they have no need for them; for gay men team sports are experienced not as sexualized aggression, just aggression” (Simpson 1994, 90).

Fitness advocates focused on the ways physical exercise enhanced girls’ sexual attractiveness to young men. Some suggested that some of girls’ “workouts” might also include watching the boys compete, thus enabling girls, as one writer put it, to “admire the boys for their [physical fitness] achievements” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 331). (Today, heterosexual girls might watch boys as sexual objects.) Girls could also use sports as a strategy to meet boys, a point made by Seventeen magazine when it suggesting that walking a mile in 11 minutes would be made more palatable if accompanied by “a boy from the track team!” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 331).

A movie sponsored by the American Dairy Association and the Presi- dent’s Council on Physical Fitness made clear that fitness, drinking milk, and sexual attractiveness went hand-in-hand, a strategy replicated in the 1980s and 1990s by milk advertising campaigns in which nearly naked boys and girls swam across a lake, emerging from the lake with glistening bodies to the announcer’s simple declaration: “milk!” In the 1960s, one newspaper pub-

lisher speculated that fitness “will make teen-age girls appear glamorous to teenage boys,” and, later in life, support woman’s “true destiny” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 331) by creating “healthful, vital, feminine women who can mother a vigorous generation” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 332).

Although the fitness crusaders publicly praised multiple forms of physical activity, it is clear, Griswold (1998, 332) notes, that many pinned their hopes on football, that manhood would be “reborn” on the nation’s playing fields. “Rough sports” would make boys’ bodies hard, capable of enduring pain, and restore masculinity itself. “Except for war,” Robert Kennedy asserted, “there is nothing in American life which trains a boy better for life than foot- ball. There is no substitute for athletics—there can be no substitute for foot- ball” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 332). More than any other sport associated with the 1960s fitness movement, football engaged the imagination of politi- cians and the public alike. Here was a sport that turned boys into men (Griswold 1998).

In hardening his body, the young man’s masculinity would, presumably, also be reinvigorated. Now his mind and body would be strong, resilient, tough; now both could be placed at the service of his country. Speaking to a New York City audience, Robert Kennedy emphasized that sport was key to the fate of the nation. Football was fun, of course, but the patriotic signifi- cance of contact sports was that they built healthy bodies and promoted “stamina, courage, unselfishness, and most importantly, perhaps, the will to win.” And without the will to win, added Kennedy, “we are lost” (quoted passages in Griswold 1998, 333).

Hot bodies and cold wars seemed to go together, at least in the mind of Robert Kennedy. Griswold tells us that he, his brother, and many others be- lieved that physical fitness would prepare the male body for war. Nothing less than national survival was at stake in the bodies of young men; they consti- tuted a flesh-and-blood barometer of national supremacy or decline. To make the young man’s body strong and virile was to restore the nation’s power and vitality. America could secure its future only if a vigorous fitness program could first transform the (white male) body. (Never mind that nu- clear annihilation made the hardness or softness of bodies irrelevant.) If the soft, feminized bodies of boys could be hardened, Kennedy felt sure, then there was a chance to discipline their minds (Griswold 1998).

But bodies were foremost, or so it seemed, as Robert Kennedy pledged to physical education teachers that the administration was committed to fitness. Minds would come soon enough, as science and mathematics curriculum would be “toughened” as well in the national curriculum reform initiatives. (Mathematics and science functioned in the mid- and late-20th-century cur- riculum debates as Latin and ancient Greek had in 19th-century debates; like physical exercise, mental “discipline” also made the mind/muscle hard.) Rob- ert Kennedy emphasized hard bodies, noting that mathematics and science

curriculum reform would amount to little if American youth lacked the bodily strength to make use of their knowledge. After all, Kennedy asserted, even technological warfare requires American soldiers and technicians to walk to the silos to push the buttons: “If we are sick people; if we are people that have difficulty walking two or three blocks to the engineering labora- tory, or four or five blocks to the missile launching site, we are not going to be able to meet the great problems that face us in the next ten years” (quoted in Griswold 1998, 336).

Robert Kennedy concluded his New York speech by praising Americans as a “tough, viable, industrious people” who do not “search for a fight” but are “prepared to meet our responsibilities.” Evidently, as Griswold points out, pull-ups, sit-ups, and sprints in school gym classes constituted the first line of defense in the Cold War. “We cannot afford to be second in any- thing—certainly not in the matter of physical fitness,” he insisted, using a