Fall 2006, Vol. 38, No. 3
By Joseph M. Speakman
They came from all over America—from the big cities, from the small towns, from the farms—tens of thousands of young men, to serve in the vanguard of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the spring of 1933.
They were the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps. They opted for long days and hard, dirty work, living in quasi-military camps often far from home in the nation’s publicly owned forests and parks. But they earned money to send back to their needy families, received three square meals a day, and escaped from idle purposelessness by contributing to the renewal and beautification of the country.
By the time the CCC program ended as the nation was entering World War II, more than 2.5 million men had served in more than 4,500 camps across the country. The men had planted over 3 billion trees, combated soil erosion and forest fires, and occasionally dealt with natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts.
In office only a few days in early March 1933, Roosevelt began to tackle the crisis threatening the nation with this unprecedented experiment in federal work relief. More than any other New Deal program, the CCC was Roosevelt’s brainchild and often referred to as his “pet.” He had a long-standing interest in conservation, and in a 1931 speech he had articulated the conservationist critique that had been animating the American movement for a half century.
“The green slopes of our forested hills lured our first settlers and furnished them the materials of a happy life,” he said. “They and their descendants were a little careless with that asset.”
Roosevelt had previewed the CCC during the 1932 presidential campaign. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he talked of putting a million men into forestry work, but after some criticism from the Hoover administration, he did not aggressively push the idea in the campaign.
But less than a week after taking office, on the morning of March 9, 1933, Roosevelt ordered some of his senior staff to come up with a way to put 500,000 young men to work on conservation projects by the summer. By that evening, they had a plan that became the focus of more discussions over the next few weeks.
Roosevelt sent a more modest proposal to Congress on March 21, calling for the employment of 250,000 men by early summer. It was quickly approved and signed into law on March 31. The final measure conveyed broad discretionary authority to the President in setting up an “Emergency Conservation Work” program. (ECW was the legal name of the program until the more popularly used CCC became official in 1937.) African American enrollees lived and worked in separate camps. 
African American enrollees lived and worked in separate camps. Young men of Company 2314-C, Kane, Pennsylvania, study radio code, which enabled them to run the camp radio station. (35-GC-B14-III-136)
Organized labor’s opposition to a proposed wage scale of $1 a day for the men was partially muted by leaving pay rates up to the President, who then went ahead with the $30 a month pay rate on his own. An amendment outlawing racial discrimination was virtually the only congressional limitation on his authority. Segregation in the 1930s was not deemed by the Supreme Court to constitute racial discrimination, and separate “Colored” CCC camps were set up for young African Americans.
In signing the measure into law, Roosevelt justified it as a means “to preserve our precious natural resources” and, even more important, as a moral and spiritual boon to needy young Americans who would prefer work to the dole. Bringing an army of the unemployed into “healthful surroundings,” Roosevelt argued, would help to eliminate the threats to social stability that enforced idleness had created.
Meanwhile, the task of setting up the machinery was well under way. Starting almost from scratch, working marathon days, through weekends, around the normal demands of routine business—thousands of public employees in hundreds of offices in Washington, D.C., and across the country successfully launched the CCC that spring and met the President’s goal by July 1.
No wonder that when it had all been done, some of the central figures could scarcely believe what they had accomplished. At the time the closest parallel anybody could think of was the drafting of 181,000 men into the armed services in the spring of 1917 after the United States had declared war on Germany.
But the tasks of 1933 involved not just greater numbers but radically new concepts and organizational structures. Impelled by the bare-bones notion of a President, CCC administrators had to work out a wholly new administrative apparatus and detailed policies. Not only did they have to decide major issues, like who was to be recruited, where they were to be sent, and what they were to do when they got there, but also, along the way, they had to deal with a myriad of smaller issues, such as what would the men wear, what would they eat, and how would they be disciplined.
