Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed almost 3 million young men from low-income families to work on projects conserving the environment, building parks, planting trees, and helping with soil erosion. The CCC, whose chief goals were conservation and economic relief, was one of the most successful programs of the New Deal.
The CCC was originally an idea Franklin Delano Roosevelt had while governor of New York. There he implemented the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration which put thousands of young men to work reforesting one million acres. During his campaign for president, he promised to extend this program into a national army of young men who would help preserve forests and help stop soil erosion. The program was aimed at low-income men who did not have an educational or vocational background. Congress passed the program in March 1933 and assigned the Executive branch to organize the structure of the new program. The Labor Department screened and selected the enrollees. The War Department built the camps for the young men and fed and clothed them. The Departments of Agriculture and Interior created and planned the projects that the young men worked on. Those selected were paid $30 a month with $23 to $25 of it being sent back to their families. The program began in April 1933 with 250,000 men housed in 1,468 camps around the nation. The men had to be between seventeen and twenty-eight, out of school, out of work, capable of hard physical work, and possess at least “three serviceable natural masticating teeth above and below.” The program continued to grow until World War Two. At its peak, the program had 2500 camps.
President Roosevelt had long been concerned about the environment and worried that the nation did not have a national plan to conserve it. He was personally involved in drafting the CCC legislation. After the banking crisis was resolved he outlined his plan for putting an army of unemployed youth to work planting trees and working on other projects.
The labor movement originally opposed the bill, because they believed the militarization of labor would force wages down. But they were eventually convinced when FDR promised to appoint Robert Fechner, the vice-president of the International Association of Machinists as the first national leader of the CCC.
The men, called “soil soldiers” by FDR, accomplished many important things. They built 3,470 fire towers; installed 65,100 miles of telephone lines; built thousands of miles of roads and trails; spent 4.1 million-man hours fighting fires; planted more than 1.3 billion new trees; they built campsites, bridges, and recreational and administrative buildings for the National Park Services. They planted trees, made reservoirs and fish ponds, built check dams, dug diversion ditches, built bridges and fire towers. They restored historic battlefields and cleared beaches and camping grounds.
Robert Fechner, the head of the CCC, was known for his racist views. Prior to 1936, African American youth made up less than 6 percent of those in the CCC. That year, however, their percentage increased to 9.9 percent and then to 11 percent in 1938 where it hovered until 1942. Of the almost 250,000 African Americans who joined the CCC, over 30,000 entered illiterate and learned to read and write. In spite of these successes, the positive experiences of African Americans in the CCC were overshadowed by the number in desperate poverty, and like most New Deal programs, failed to establish a just system that truly aided African Americans.
The program was popular with local and national officials. Young men continued to sign up until the defense industry boom that came with World War Two. In 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps program was disbanded.
Header Image: Harris & Ewing Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Learn More:
Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993.
Bernstein, Irving. A Caring Society: The New Deal, The Worker, and the Great Depression. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.[show_more more=+ less=- color="#eccd50" font-size="65"]
Biles, Roger. The South and the New Deal. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Kirby, John B. Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1992.
Schlesinger, Arthur Meier. The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1960.
Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks the Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade. New-York: Oxford University Press, 2009.[/show_more]
About the Author:
Dr. James Ross has a Ph.D. from Auburn University and is a specialist in the interaction of race, class, and religion in 20th century United States history. He also spends much of his time investigating Arkansas history. He is a former high school teacher and serves as assistant coordinator of the secondary social studies education program.