Holly Allen's Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives treads some familiar terrain but also subtly adds to the map of New Deal cultural history. Allen links the radical expansion of federal government bureaucracy and welfare projects through the economic crisis of the 1930s and war in the 1940s, with a range of what she terms “civic stories” circulating in the public sphere (3). Put together thematically, these stories become “civic genres” by which traditional values (often configured around the white heterosexual married couple, male authority, and family values) are ordained and apparently strengthened at the same time that radical changes are made to the social structure through the New Deal initiatives that threaten to undermine those values (3).

Appropriately, this begins with the concept of the “Forgotten Man,” taken from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's radio speech of 1932, whose masculinity and authority were to be restored by the New Deal's emergency initiatives, even as they challenged traditional concepts of individual liberty. Allen's chapters on masculinity detail this tension well: from the creation of segregated hobo camps in order to manage perceived sexual deviancy and threats to heteronormative behavior, to the restrictive gender politics of Work Relief programs and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Allen has scoured popular and government publications for evidence and examples of the proliferation of traditional civic stories. So, while the CCC militarized youth in camp life, threatened free-labor and -trade policies, and enforced homosociality, appearing to breach the boundary of civil and family liberties valued in American tradition, the narrative of the pioneer and the extolling of hard physical work accommodated Americans to this shift in welfare provision. The rehabilitated, muscular, and well-trained CCC youth thereby became a highly pleasurable figure of individual and national recovery, rather than a specter of social and economic breakdown, too much government, or curtailment of freedom. Welfare resources and tax revenues were thereby commandeered towards radical projects that were potentially unpopular by harnessing the projects to mythic and traditionalist “civic stories” created both by the agencies and within popular New Deal culture.

Racism and sexism underpinned other “civic genres” that accompanied the unprecedented projects set up to help the poor, unemployed, and needy. Familiar misogynist stereotypes fed into the demonization of the married woman worker, the proliferation of “nagging wife” figures (99, 102–4, 108–9), and widespread perceptions of the promiscuous materialistic “gold digger,” reinforcing compliancy with the New Deal project's focus on traditional roles for women in activities such as sewing and domestic or health care. While representing a shift in working culture for women, female administrators and social workers employed by projects were depicted as snoopers and incompetents to mute their legitimacy and authority over the working man who came to them for relief and aid: emotionally charged women-blaming practices “were incorporated in order to make new forms of state policy and action more palatable,” Allen writes (131). Even where federal projects dictated fairness and equality, individual states applied their own form of conservative narratives to justify breaking the programs’ radical welfare rules through restricting access to projects to whites, segregating or channeling nonwhite recipients into low-paid segregated work. Civic narratives, Allen shows, were crucial to this process of threat management.

The last two chapters of the book show how these practices and tensions entered into the wartime programs, exploring how rituals and narratives of civic preparedness evoked white male hostility to home-front enemies (such as loose, incompetent or meddlesome women; civil rights protestors; strikers, or Japanese American males). Such narratives helped to constitute a public that would support interventionist policies, accept limits to personal freedom and manage the disruption to gender and family conventions of home-front organizing. Civilian defense activities were promulgated that were consistent with traditional gender roles in contrast with unprecedented numbers of women working. In the final chapter, Allen shows how the “dubious constitutionality of internment” of Japanese Americans during the war was soft-pedaled through the civic narratives of the War Relocation Authority (175). In parallels with the accommodation to civilian camps generated by the civic genres circulating around the CCC early in the Depression, Allen shows how, during radical social and political change, popular conservative gender and race narratives serve to apparently ameliorate and accommodate public thought to those changes.

While the book sweeps over a huge range of materials, schemes, and examples, by linking them together thematically Allen makes a convincing argument that conservative sexual and racial narratives functioned to combat popular anxieties about the emergent welfare state and its apparent threat to traditional values such as family autonomy and individual and civil liberties. Allen's contribution to New Deal cultural history, then, is to reveal a deep conservative imperative within the radical project of New Deal recovery reforms and to show the processes by which new forms of state power and intervention are made palatable to a reluctant and conservative public.