I am interested in how nationalist elites worked to capture and create the bodies of Syrians in the course of the 1930s. By examining physical activity as it manifested itself in schools, scouting, and soccer, I will look at some of the disciplinary technologies that the state used to make new men for the nation in an attempt to understand how the meaning of being a man changed in this context. Through physical education in schools, the government worked to create men with sound minds and bodies, reflecting a desire to break with the colonial past. In scouting, the government hoped to expose young men to the rough life and engender a desire to serve the nation. With soccer matches, the government attached national significance to athletic contests as a register of modernity and progress. The latter two venues especially involved the concept of performance: as scouts marched through the streets in orderly parades and soccer sides glided across the pitch in organized movement, crowds paid attention. As a result, the nation's new men were not simply created in private toil; rather, they were displayed for all to see. A powerful theme in all of these activities is the sense that urban Syrian men had become effeminate from the comforts of a burgeoning consumer society while rural Syrian men had become backward in their ignorance of contemporary technologies. By championing both mental acuity and corporeal strength, many of these activities might be seen as attempts to resolve this tension. Another powerful if perhaps less explicit theme is the connection between new images of masculinity and the mandate state. The premise of the mandate system - that Syrians were unfit to rule and had to be taught by the more mature French - is etched into these responses. Physical activity provided a means for Syrians to display their literal robustness for the figurative endeavor of making a nation. In order to approach these issues, I am relying on the newspaper al-Qabas, the organ of the most prominent elite nationalist group in this time period and a rich record of the various elite efforts to control male bodies and, to a lesser extent, popular responses to these plans. In doing so, I hope to shift the perspective away from a conventional political narrative of the French mandate and toward an analysis of the politics of masculinity in this context.