Feeding the Organization Man: Diet and Masculinity in Postwar America

Abstract

In 1958, renowned historian and cultural critic Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. publicly lamented decrepitude of American masculinity. What has happened to American male? he wondered. For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity. But now he was a harried, sexualiy indeterminate refugee from affluent society, seemingly in flight from everything that had once made him forceful and individual. How to resolve this crisis? Schlesinger favored reengagement with political process, which he termed virile democratic exertion, but whatever remedy, reform from within struck him as particularly crucial: the achievement of identity, conquest of a sense of self.... [T]hese will do infinitely more to restore American masculinity than all hormones in test tubes of our scientists.1 In his own way, exuberant television health guru Jack LaLanne was ad' dressing exactly same malaise. You gotta get down to masculinity! he bellowed to one interviewer while discussing American man's dangerous lack of interest in dieting. He's losing his manhood! They just sit and overeat and overdrink and they won't do anything until it becomes a status symbol!2 To LaLanne, at least, dieting offered a way for American man to reverse ebbing tide of manhood. Throughout early postwar era, a variety of white middle-class men who agreed with his diagnosis, ranging from social critics Vance Packard and John Gunther, from advertising executive Elmer Wheeler to ordinary people profiled in popular magazines, publicly explored implications of male weight loss. Both critiquing and accommodating themselves to nation's affluence, they responded to crisis Schlesinger had identified by producing diet narratives. By adapting what had typically been tales of female self-discovery, and by relocating fulcrum of masculinity from exercise to diet, such narratives rewrote masculinity to fit a soft age of organization and suburbanization. In so doing, they articuiated a new consumerist masculinity whose renewed authority resided in ability to control consumption. Few today might associate thinness, especially male thinness, with 1950s. Given popularity of cookbooks that extolled dinners prepared by can-opener, pastel creativity of suburban cuisine, and almost institutionalized threemartini lunch and cocktail hour, middle-class American males, at least, spent more time filling their stomachs than worrying about what they ate. Indeed, public-opinion polls consistently revealed that far more women than men de? scribed themselves as dieters. (Nor do average weight figures suggest any drastic change in men's weights.) In 1955, Science News Letter even resorted to adver? tising for a motivating force, social, fashion or otherwise, to make men 'strive for slimness' way women have. If found, this motive might lead to progress against that major health problem, obesity, or, in less polite terms, fatness. As