Civilian Conservation Corps
The Civilian Conservation Corps was a government work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28, who volunteered amid widespread unemployment. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal that supplied manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments. The CCC was designed to supply jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States. There was a smaller counterpart program for unemployed women called the She-She-She Camps, which were championed by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Robert Fechner was the first director of this agency, succeeded by James McEntee following Fechner's death. The largest enrollment at any one time was 300,000. Through the course of its nine years in operation, three million young men took part in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a monthly wage of $30, $25 of which had to be sent home to their families.
The American public made the CCC the most popular of all the New Deal programs. Sources written at the time claimed an individual's enrollment in the CCC led to improved physical condition, heightened morale, and increased employability. The CCC also led to a greater public awareness and appreciation of the outdoors and the nation's natural resources, and the continued need for a carefully planned, comprehensive national program for the protection and development of natural resources.
The CCC operated separate programs for veterans and Native Americans. Approximately 15,000 Native Americans took part in the program, helping them weather the Great Depression.
By 1942, with World War II raging and the draft in effect, the need for work relief declined, and Congress voted to close the program.
Founding
As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt had run a similar program on a much smaller scale, known as the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. It was started in early 1932 to "use men from the lists of the unemployed to improve our existing reforestation areas." In its first year alone, more than 25,000 unemployed New Yorkers were active in its paid conservation work. Long interested in conservation, as president Roosevelt proposed a full-scale national program to Congress on March 21, 1933:He promised this law would provide 250,000 young men with meals, housing, workwear, and medical care in exchange for their work in the national forests and other government properties. The Emergency Conservation Work Act was introduced to Congress the same day and enacted by voice vote on March 31. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6101 on April 5, 1933, which established the CCC organization and appointed a director, Robert Fechner, a former labor union official who served until 1939. The organization and administration of the CCC was a new experiment in operations for a federal government agency. The order directed that the program be supervised jointly by four government departments: Labor, which recruited the young men; War, which operated the camps; the Agriculture; and Interior, which organized and supervised the work projects. A CCC Advisory Council was composed of a representative from each of those departments. In addition, the Office of Education and Veterans Administration participated in the program. To overcome opposition from labor unions, which wanted no training programs started when so many of their members were unemployed, Roosevelt chose Robert Fechner, vice president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, as director of the Corps. William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor, was taken to the first camp to see that there was no job training involved beyond simple manual labor.
U.S. Army
Officers from the U.S. Army were in charge of the camps, but there was no military training. The Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General Douglas MacArthur, was placed in charge of the program. Initially, about 3,800 of the Regular Army's 13,000 officers and 4,600 of its 120,000 enlisted men were assigned in the spring of 1933 to administer the CCC. The troops were pulled from just about every source possible, but usually from the Army’s combat regiments and battalions, and Army instructors on duty with ROTC, Organized Reserve, and National Guard organizations. In at least one case each, district personnel were drawn from an engineer regiment and an Air Corps group. MacArthur soon said that the number of Regular Army personnel assigned to the CCC was affecting military readiness.Only 575 Organized Reserve officers initially received orders for CCC duty. CCC tours were initially six months long, but were later lengthened to one year. In July 1933, the War Department ordered that Regular Army officers assigned as instructors with ROTC and Organized Reserve units be returned to their former duties. By the end of September 1933, the number of Regular officers on CCC duty had dropped to about 2,000 and the number of Reservists had increased to 2,200. By June 1934, only 400 Regular officers remained on CCC duty, and by October, Reserve officers had assumed command of almost all CCC companies and sub-districts. Effective on 1 January 1938, the War Department limited the number of Regular officers assigned to CCC duty to only 117.
Due to a ruling that Reserve officers on CCC duty had to have the same housing and subsistence benefits as Regular officers, President Roosevelt directed that all Reservists be relieved from CCC duty effective 1 July 1939. The changeover was complete by September 1939, but it was a change largely in name only because many of the Reservists merely took off their uniforms and continued their jobs with the CCC as civilians, albeit with lower pay.
The Army found numerous benefits in the program. Through the CCC, the Regular Army could assess the leadership performance of both Regular and Reserve officers. In mobilizing, clothing, feeding, and controlling thousands of men, the CCC provided lessons which the Army used in developing its wartime mobilization plans for training camps. When the draft began in 1940, the policy was to make CCC alumni corporals and sergeants. The CCC also provided command experience to Reserve officers, who normally interacted almost exclusively with other officers during training and did not have the chance to lead large numbers of enlisted men. Future Chief of Staff of the Army General George C. Marshall "embraced" the CCC, unlike many of his brother officers.
History
An implicit goal of the CCC was to restore morale in an era of 25% unemployment for all men and much higher rates for poorly educated teenagers. Jeffrey Suzik argues in "'Building Better Men':The CCC Boy and the Changing Social Ideal of Manliness" that the CCC provided an ideology of manly outdoor work to counter the Depression, as well as cash to help the family budget. Through a regime of heavy manual labor, civic and political education, and an all-male living and working environment, the CCC tried to build "better men" who would be economically independent and self-reliant. By 1939, there was a shift in the ideal from the hardy manual worker to the highly trained citizen soldier ready for war.