Agriculture and working the nation’s natural resources were aspects of American progress that made this country the land of opportunity and helped turn it into a world power. For 300 years pioneering Americans used the soil, water, wildlife, timber and minerals to make unprecedented economic achievement and create a dazzling civilization. Unlike Native Americans who preceded them, these progressive-thinking Euro-Americans gave little regard to what their exploits were doing to the earth they lived and worked on. By the 1930s America had what in today’s vernacular would be known as a serious environmental problem.
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.”
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Frank Chadwick said:
Great article. My uncle Paul worked with the CCC during the Great Depresion, then put himself through school and joined the Soil Conservation Service (under the great Hugh Hammond Benett) back in its first year of existence, 1935, fighting the Oklahoma “dust bowl.” Later Uncle Paul moved over to the Army Corps of Engineers as a civilian engineer and had a long and distiniguished career of public service — none of which would have been likely for a destitute kid from Hermann, MO, without the CCC.
November 8th, 2009 at 10:09 pm