Thrust into this maelstrom of fires, floods and shifting, decaying topography was a monumental government mobilization program. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, faced with national economic and natural resource crises, convinced the U. S. Congress in his first hundred days in office to pass legislation to get the country moving again. One of the opening salvos in the New Deal was the Civilian Conservation Corps, the topic of the second program in the American Experience series The 1930s on PBS.

Filmmaker Robert Stone, who created the episode “The Civilian Conservation Corps” for the series, considers the effort one of the most important of Roosevelt’s early policies.

“The Civilian Conservation Corps both addressed the issue of unemployment, particularly among young people, men, and also addressed this environmental problem head-on. And I think really saved this country. The reason we’re the bread basket of the world right now is largely because of the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in preserving America’s topsoil which was really just washing out to sea.”

Billions of new trees were planted by the CCC. The initial group of men, more that 250,000, was inducted in just three months and the program was run by the U. S. Army. Though discipline and the rigors of army life were introduced in the camps that spanned all regions of the country, the CCC was not a military training operation. Nevertheless criticism sprung up initially in nearly all quarters—business, labor, communities—but the FDR administration used some savvy politics and strong public relations to keep the program on track. As a result says Stone:

“In 1937 when Roosevelt attempted to balance the budget and cut back on these New Deal programs, Congress wouldn’t let him. Republicans wanted the CCC as much as anybody because it was very popular in their districts. The CCC was probably the most popular New Deal program perhaps with the exception of Social Security. It was widespread across the country—people saw what good works they were doing and that in turn built support for all of the work that Roosevelt was doing.”

Among those other New Deal programs was the Works Progress Administration that broadened the work of the CCC through expansive public projects such as the construction of Hoover Dam, the topic of the third episode of The 1930s. (Part One of this article outlines all episodes). The CCC also expanded its goals for the corps members, including teaching construction and other skills, expanding erosion prevention and wildfire control.

Stone uses four CCC veterans to narrate his piece. Their experiences are revealing in the honesty of their comments—they ate well, they learned a lot, they were glad to be working at a time when work was difficult to find. They talk about the camaraderie but also the resistance they sometimes felt in the communities where the camps were located. One of narrators is Hispanic and one African American (the CCC had separate camps for African Americans) and they talk about prejudice within the corps and the towns where they served, but still their overriding impressions were positive. Stone evaluates their feelings and what the experience meant to these men.

“My impression is the reason they look fondly at this time in their lives is that there was this sense of the community spirit—that we’re all in this together. And that‘s a spirit that was lost in the in intervening years. Everybody that we spoke to that went through an experience like that, it profoundly impacted the rest of their life.”

“I think we came out of the Depression, we came out of World War II—what we call the Greatest Generation—with national purpose, national spirit, that in the intervening years we’ve kind of lost. We’re in a recession now. I don’t see the country uniting the way that it did in the 1930s unfortunately. I would like to see a kind of national service program like the CCC. Certainly if I was a young man, I would join something like that.”

I dunno. According to Mashable, a social media guide, the average Twitter user is a teenage girl. Now, there’s nothing wrong with teenage girls. I was a teenage girl once. But I was concerned with little more than Duran Duran, class elections, making the volleyball team, and buying an outfit for Friday night’s football game. Had I been Tweeting, my entries would have read along these lines: “Vote for Tracey for Vice President!” or “New Jordache jeans from Filene’s!”

The fact is, Twitter is here, and it’s not going away until the next social media phenomenon renders it as relevant as Friendster.

But how useful is it?

Well for those of us in the business of making history relevant, it’s actually becoming quite useful. This week I literally StumbledUpon an ingenious use of Twitter: bringing history to life.

Now, mention of the Great Depression conjures up images of bread lines, New Deal projects, and milk crate furniture. But just as there’s more to Twitter than frivolous updates regarding volleyball tryouts, there’s also more to the Great Depression than the aforementioned images.

Peeling peaches, cutting corn, mowing hay, and losing an arm also belong in the vault of Great Depression images. David Griner, a social media strategist, tweets the day-to-day musings of Depression-era teen Genevieve Spencer. In real time. Sort of.

Spencer was Griner’s great aunt who lived on a farm in rural Illinois. She kept a line-a-day diary from 1937 to 1941, and Griner tweets about her often mundane, sometime surprising observations.

Mundane: Mamma made a lot of preserves to-day. Mr. Moore was hurt. -Sept. 18, 1937

Surprising: Took Mr. Moore’s arm off. -Sept. 21, 1937

No word of who took the arm off or why, but I sure hope it wasn’t Genny. The diary also reminds us that teenage boys have not changed in 70 years:

School started. Have a new pupil, Matt Rulo. -Sept 7, 1937

Matt hugged the girls to-day. -Sept. 8, 1937

That Matt, he sure didn’t waste any time.

Amidst all the peeling, canning, and school-and-church attending, little Genny was also concerned with celebrity news. On the day Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean, Genny wrote this short entry (thank you, radio!):

Lester Donald and rest went fishing. Mamma washed. Amelia Eraheart (sic) went down. -July 2, 1937

And six days later, the disappearance was still on America’s mind:

Haven’t found Amelia yet. -July 8, 1937

(Note, this week GreatHistory’s Kim Green wrote about the famous aviatrix’s rightful place in history.)

Genny was also informed of international events, which are nonchalantly juxtaposed to the quotidian:

Went to hospital. Aunt Mayne came to see Aunt Pete. King George coronated. -May 12, 1937

Went to church with Mrs. Johnson. The Hiendenbergh (sic) exploded. -May 6, 1937

And of course, what good would a diary be without a local scandal:

Went to Mrs. Johnson’s today. Daddy went to sale at Pattersons. Norma Lewis ran off and got married to Norman Jarvis.

Genny’s diary runs until 1941, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Currently Genny has 2,641 followers. I mean 2,642. You can find Genny on Twitter as Genny_Spencer. She’s worth following.

Or, one can go the chart way, as ritzholtz.com does, overlaying the 1929 Dow with the 2000 NASDAQ. The similarities are eerie, and if we follow chart logic, then we have not yet reached rock bottom. The good news: we’re not that far from rock bottom. The bad news: the Dow chart only spikes confidently upward in 1942, after the US has entered a war.

There’s another connection, albeit a somewhat specious one, between Prohibition and the War on Drugs. The argument is specious because repealing Prohibition did not have a positive, immediate effect on the economy. It did not put more money into people’s pockets. But it did, as the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition notes, stop the violence that bootlegging created.

Heck, even we at GreatHistory.com know that the Great Depression, one of the defining eras of the last century, should continually be revisited. And just last week Peter Culos wrote about how the recession might be a boon to the arts.

The folks over at the National Endowment for the Humanities look at the more cultural effects of the Great Depression in its July/August issue. Morris Dickstein’s book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, due out this month, tells us that not all was dark and gloomy, culturally speaking, during the 1930s. In fact, people looked to art, film, literature, music, and other areas of leisure to escape their deplorable economic positions.

Harlem Renaissance, anyone?

Many parts of the world are still in the summer vacation season and, with less cash to burn, people are looking for cheap entertainment. According to Brook S. Mason in the on-line newsletter, The Art Newspaper, attendance at National Trust properties in the US and the UK have been on the rise. Visitors have flocked to artist sites and historic homes, in some cases by as much as 50% over last year. Overall, in the UK, 24% more people have visited National Trust sites this year than last. Many of those sites have free or very modest admission. Anyone who has taken a family of four to the movies will like the sound of that.

In the US, the home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) saw 50% more traffic just in the month of May. Visits to Jackson Pollock’s place was up 20% this year, and Frederic Edwin Church’s crib had a 10% increase in interest. Clearly, millions of people are foregoing more expensive forms of entertainment for a whirl through a museum while soaking up some air conditioning. They’re also soaking up art and history, which is never a bad thing.

Can you see the silver lining here? If not, maybe a little history will help. Flashback to the Great Depression in the States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt started the Public Works Art Program, which later became the Federal Arts Project (FAP) in 1935. It employed thousands of artists who painted murals and crafted sculptures for public places. Millions of people were exposed to public art for the first time. After the economy started humming again at the end of WWII, the stage was set for the great American art movements of the 1950s and 60s. People had seen art and liked it. Now they had some money. Get the picture?

Once the economy gets cranked up again, a public newly interested in art will be spending money like sailors on shore leave and starving artists will be eating caviar and filet mignon. Sweet! Make mine medium rare please!

There is a dark side to all this, though. Donations to National Trust sites are down, especially at the higher levels ($25,000 and up). While memberships are up, it takes a lot of $35 memberships to replace that $50,000 gift. It becomes a war of attrition.

Take the matter of 19th Century steamboat boiler explosions. Hundreds died before even the basic principles were understood. It took until 1830 for Congress to fund research aimed at ending boiler explosions.

A great grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Dallas Alexander Bache, performed some of that research. During one experiment, he crouched behind a bank of the Pennyback River outside Philadelphia to keep his head from being blown off by a blast.

Bache was observing an experiment designed to settle one of the mysteries of steam boilers: Would a gradual increase in steam pressure, rather than a sudden expansion of steam, burst a boiler of iron or copper? Or would the boilers harmlessly tear apart at their seams and pop their rivets and sputter and spend their energy with relatively little explosive violence?

The question was critical because many believed only sudden increases in pressure could burst a boiler. Although engineers and crews involved in many disastrous explosions had said that they had not allowed a sudden rise in steam pressure, their testimony was dismissed as incredible. They had been known to add water to hot boilers for races or to try to make up for lost time or when pulling away from docks, triggering some of the worst accidents. Alarmed at the steamboat explosions and the general outcry from the public and press, Congress for the first time funded scientific research into a matter of public safety involving private business.

Steam travel was a miracle technology that, along with steam railroad trains, had gained almost instant popularity. Writers theorized steam would “annihilate distance,” unifying places and people that would have required weeks and months to reach one or another or communicate. But the disasters associated with steam travel now threatened to cut short its promise. Boiler explosions were less common than collisions, fires and snags, but the sudden destruction on crowded ships and horrific details of dozens of similar disasters lingered in imaginations.

High-pressure steam engines, first introduced in the U.S. in 1816 by Oliver Evans, had increased the internal pressure of boilers 20 times, from 7.5 pounds per square inch to 149 lbs per square inch. Boiler design safety and the strength of material used to build boilers had not kept pace.

Not only had America few established scientific facilities, but the scientitsts had to invent many of the methods and tools used to do the work.

To answer the question of what bursts a boiler, Bache and his colleagues built cylinder-shaped boilers of iron and copper, about a foot in diameter and with skin .02-inch thick. These were placed in a heavier cylinder of wrought iron, which had an opening at its bottom. The bigger cylinder would be the furnace with a fire built at its bottom to heat the boiler vessel inside. The boiler was half-filled with water, placed inside the furnace cyclinder and a coal fire was stoked. A pressure gauge inside the boiler would convey data that could be read from outside the vessel.

A rivet had been deliberately left out of the first test boiler, made of iron, so that the pressure buildup would be gradual. After one or two false starts, Bache and his assistants stoked a hot-burning fire whose flames licked the sides of the boiler. Steam escaping through the rivet hole whistled like a tea kettle. The whistling grew shrill and higher pitched. As the fleeing steam escaped, Bache and his colleagues supposed that too much water had by now been vaporized for any danger to be present.

They peeked their heads up above the river bank.

Just then, the boiler blew with the ferocity “of an eight inch mortar,” according to the scientists’ report. The boiler had had been flown 15 feet off the top of the little boiler. The 45 pound-furnace cylinder had been overturned and pushed four feet from its original position.

To Bache and his fellow committee members, the gradual pace of the pressure increase had nothing to do with the final result. As the water level fell and pressure rose to about 11 atmospheres, the tension on the boiler head proved irresistible. The same experiment was performed on a copper boiler with similar results. It didn’t matter how gradually the pressure built, steam could blow a boiler apart with the same ferocity as when the pressure suddenly increased.

The basis for the first safety codes for steam engine operation had been determined.

It began in a Western Union office in rural Warren, Pennsylvania, and it evolved into one of the most publicized and bitterest controversies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

On the evening of July 5, 1935, telegraph operator Arthur Christianson told a teenage messenger, Paul Elmer Danielson, to start a fire in a basement stove and burn some telegram records. Danielson refused, leaving the job to Christianson. Some of the records were of telegrams sent by Pennsylvanians urging their congressmen to defeat a key piece of FDR’s New Deal legislation.

Or were they? Manipulating Congress was then an evolving art, and many of the Pennsylvanians whose names appeared on the telegrams had no knowledge of telegrams sent under their names. The fake telegrams had been part of an effort to change Congress’ mind on the New Dealers’ effort to limit the size and power of utility holding companies. Within a few weeks, Danielson found himself on one of the most frightening stages in America: a packed room on Capitol Hill opposite a panel of U.S. senators.

Facing him was Senator Hugo Black, a relentless investigator and staunch New Dealer. At the start of the hearings earlier that year, Black had announced to reporters, “Come on in boys, the show’s about to begin.” The show that followed ranks with some of the greatest Congressional investigations ever held. FDR had made the utility bill a central part of his program, but utility lobbyists, with a home base in the winged chairs of Washington, D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel, used their influence boldly. Black, in turn, used the hearings to show the wealth and power that the utilities poured into the legislative contest and to suggest that a utility offered a bribe to one congressman (the charge was never conclusively proved). The bigger issue was the utilities’ ability to spin the issue and convince Congress that the utilities had public support.

For example, a young freshman senator from Missouri, Harry S Truman, received 30,000 messages from his constituents. The utilities cultivated fears that the legislation would amount to “the nationalization of the industry,” with all the intended overtones of socialism and communism. The president of the Edison Electric Institute, the utilities’ lobbying arm, attacked FDR’s plan as a “condition of mind that even many of his closest associates in Washington do not understand.” Other utility executives harped on the issue as FDR’s “obsession,” as if to say the president wasn’t in his right mind. The idea was to worry voters that the vital electricity and gas supply could be threatened and to alarm all the investors in the utility stocks that their investments would suffer.

The New Dealers wielded powerful weapons, too. Black took to the radio with a special address to Americans, and he seized business records and tax returns, an unprecedented and controversial exercise of power. And he found a perfect villain in Howard Hopson, who controlled American Gas & Electric, one of the worst of the electric and gas monopolies and the source of most of the fake telegrams. New Dealers won public support for the monopoly holding company “death sentence” and eventually the first congressional system of lobbyist registration.

Richard Korman’s biography of inventor Charles Goodyear was picked by the Library Journal as one of the best business-related books of 2002. His feature writing has appeared in The New York Times and Business Week and his website for developing writers is http://www.confidentwriter.com.

Until I began digging into the details of the Great Depression in California, a state I visit several times each year, all I knew about Sinclair was his work as a crusading writer who exposed the meatpacking industry in The Jungle, published in 1920.

Then I stumbled on Sinclair’s run for governor in 1934 and learned that he was a starry-eyed utopian socialist who became the unlikely Democratic nominee. More remarkable than Sinclair’s campaign were the vicious attacks on him via the media by William Randolph Hearst, Louis B. Mayer and others.

A stage for the clamorous political extremes of the 1930s, California was still heavily agricultural when the hard times hit. The state was home to left-wing radicals, violent right-wing police, business leaders and some crackpots. As the hard times unfolded, San Francisco police shot dead striking longshoremen; a retired dentist built a national movement for retiree benefits that enrolled millions of followers; and 300,000 arriving migrants populated stinking shanty and shack towns in the Central Valley. To say that overreaction and messianic zeal complicated matters isn’t overstatement. That was California’s Great Depression.

Enter impetuous, rail-thin Sinclair, a vegetarian who had a history of socialist activity in California from the 1920s. Sinclair had built a utopian community in New Jersey that was destroyed by fire, leaving him broke. After relocating to Pasadena the writer mixed tennis, politics and privileged access to the wealthy elite, and he formulated plans to remake society as an agricultural and industrial utopia based on production for use, rather than profit. This airy vision also involved heavier taxes on wealth and property. He called it the End Poverty in California, or EPIC program. (The End Poverty League set up an office at 1501 South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles.)

Somehow Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination as he released a book, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. He faced off against incumbent Republican Frank Merriam.

In horror the California establishment rose up to stop Sinclair, and in so doing, invented some of the most dastardly practices of media manipulation that blight our political process to this day. Hearst did his part, but so also did famed producers Mayer and Irving Thalberg. An orchestrated campaign of lies about Sinclair appeared regularly in the mostly Republican-owned newspapers. Thalberg and Mayer put together a series of newsreel-like film shorts that showed actors masquerading as deadbeats and hobos who said they were heading to the state to enjoy Sinclair’s coming socialist revolution.

After a famous meeting at the White House between FDR and Sinclair, the writer declared the president to be one of the most “lovable” men he had ever met. But FDR adroitly withheld endorsement.

Sinclair used the media too, and millions received his newsletter. And at times he was his own worst enemy, revealing “a sense of himself at center stage that verged on narcissism,” according to author and historian Kevin Starr. “There was something foreign,” wrote Starr, in “the messianic statism of the movement.” But then again, wrote Starr, “Roosevelt’s critics would soon be saying the same thing about the New Deal.”

Richard Korman’s biography of inventor Charles Goodyear was picked by the Library Journal as one of the best business-related books of 2002. His feature writing has appeared in The New York Times and Business Week and his website for developing writers is http://www.confidentwriter.com.