Salvaging Marginalized Men: How the Department of Defense Waged the War on Poverty

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-400
Author(s):  
JOHN WORSENCROFT
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Military Installations ◽  
Male Breadwinner ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Military

AbstractArchitects of social welfare policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the military as a site for strengthening the male breadwinner as the head of the “traditional family.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert McNamara—men not often mentioned in the same conversations—both spoke of “salvaging” young men through military service. The Department of Defense created Project Transition, a vocational jobs-training program for GIs getting ready to leave the military, and Project 100,000, which lowered draft requirements in order to put men who were previously unqualified into the military. The Department of Defense also made significant moves to end housing discrimination in communities surrounding military installations. Policymakers were convinced that any extension of social welfare demanded reciprocal responsibility from its male citizens. During the longest peacetime draft in American history, policymakers viewed programs to expand civil rights and social welfare as also expanding the umbrella of the obligations of citizenship.

Schools of Citizenship

2018 ◽  
pp. 64-86
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Confederate States Of America ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Military

Conceived in war, the Confederate States of America was a nation-state built around its military. As this chapter argues, military service quickly became fused with ideas about Confederate citizenship, and the military became a site where faith in the national cause melded effortlessly with religion and where white southern men were schooled in how to become soldiers and citizens, all at once.

Maintaining Male Exclusivity: Porcelain Privilege in the Military

2021 ◽  
pp. 0095327X2199236
Author(s):  
Shannon Portillo ◽  
Alesha Doan ◽  
Ashley Mog
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equity ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
Special Forces ◽  
Special Operations ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Military ◽  
Masculine Culture ◽  
The U.S

Current debates about bathrooms and bathroom policy contribute to a long history of how space shapes norms and expectations about privacy and gender equity in the workplace. The military serves as a significant site of discussion, particularly as the Department of Defense moves forward with efforts to integrate women into combat positions. Relying on an analysis of 27 focus groups with a total of 198 participants we collected from Special Operations in the U.S. Army, we examine bathrooms as a site where male soldiers contest and resist female integration. Using Sasson-Levy and Katz’s concept of institutional de-gendering and re-gendering, we argue that men’s resistance to gender-neutral toilets is an effort to re-gender Special Forces and maintain the hegemonic masculine culture that acutely defines it.

El Sur También Existe: Imagining futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-374
Author(s):  
Diana Murtaugh Coleman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
The United States ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Military Base ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Political Refugees ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Military

Guantánamo is infamous as a site of extra-legal detention in the wake of 9/11; more than a single site, it is part of a web of the United States’ militarization operating in the Global South. An area of the military base is now being revitalized as a new camp for climate change–related mass migration events predicted to occur throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. In February 2018, RQ Construction, LLC (Carlsbad, California) won a 23-million-dollar contract to build a “Contingency Mass Migration Complex” at Guantánamo to house migrants and personnel at the military base in a massive tent city. Though less explicitly worded, other large Department of Defense awards for work at Guantánamo point toward extensive infrastructure development as recently as March 2019. The United States’ militarized response to climate-based migration is an extension of the logic through which economic and political refugees are branded criminals or terrorists.

“A Draft-Dodging Business”

Rough Draft ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 95-128
Author(s):  
Amy J. Rutenberg
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
White Men ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Rehabilitation Programs ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Minority Men ◽  
Procurement System ◽  
The Military

This chapter explores the creation of anti-poverty programs that functioned through the military manpower procurement system. Military resources were tapped to fight the War on Poverty and the War on Poverty was used to staff the military. Civilian rehabilitation programs identified clients through the system used to conscript soldiers. The Pentagon’s Project 100,000 drafted men otherwise unqualified for military service into the armed forces, ostensibly to offer them skills they could use to become successful breadwinners in their civilian lives. Civilian rehabilitation programs and Project 100,000 both were based on the assumption that useful men financially supported their families. Both explicitly tied breadwinner masculinity to citizenship in the name of national defense. And both specifically targeted poor and minority men, overtly tying this constituency to the military to the exclusion of wealthier (white) men.

A Historical Preface to the Americans with Disabilities Act

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward D. Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Americans With Disabilities Act ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Disability Policy ◽  
White House ◽  
George Bush

On 26 July 1990, President George Bush signed an ambitious new civil rights law at an emotional ceremony held on the South Lawn of the White House. Passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, PL 101–336) brought civil rights protections for people with disabilities to a level of parity with civil rights protections already enjoyed by racial minorities and by women. What accounted for a Republican administration enthusiastically endorsing a sweeping civil rights law that might benefit as many as 43 million people? Briefly put, historical traditions within disability policy that in turn reflected broader trends within social welfare policy between 1950 and 1990 allowed the ADA to be portrayed in conservative terms that were congenial to a Republican administration.

Sex and the Soldier: The Discourse about the Moral Conduct of Bundeswehr Soldiers and Officers during the Adenauer Era

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friederike Brühöfener
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Moral Conduct ◽  
Compulsory Military Service ◽  
Male Breadwinner ◽  
The Social ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis article situates the establishment of the Bundeswehr and the implementation of compulsory military service in the 1950s and early 1960s within contemporary efforts to define a “sexual-moral order” for the Federal Republic of Germany. It argues that West Germany's rearmament offered contemporaries an opportunity to stipulate not only acceptable soldierly behavior, but also adequate male behavior in general. In the context of heightened concerns about juvenile delinquents (so-called Halbstarken), female prostitution, homosexuality, and the distribution of pornographic materials, West German citizens became interested in the social and sexual conduct of Bundeswehr soldiers and officers. Whereas some still considered the military to be a “school of the nation” and of proper masculinity, others worried about the armed forces as a possible breeding ground for immorality. Partly sharing these concerns, government representatives, members of the Bundestag, church officials, and military commanders sought to guide soldiers’ behavior, emphasizing the ideal of the “complete” (vollkommene) Christian male-breadwinner family.

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