Roosevelt never meant the CCC to be a panacea for the systemic woes of the Great Depression, but it did save a vast number of young men from homelessness or, even worse, hopelessness. As Ray Smith of CCC Company 991 in California put it, his work-relief mates had “the mark of shattered ambitions and blasted hopes written in their faces,” and the “fruitless tramping of the city streets showing in every stride.”69 Roosevelt viewed his “boys” not merely as temporary relief workers, but as makers of a permanent, greener new America. Bursting with optimism, he believed the work-relief experience would transform the young recruits intellectually as well as physically. Teamwork and citizenship and conservation would all be learned in the CCC. Many kinds of Americans—Slavic, Jewish, Italian, and Irish among them—found themselves working as a band of brothers, saying, “We’re all Americans,” with a newfound sense of patriotic unity.70
V
Only thirty-seven days after Roosevelt’s stirring inaugural speech in May, the first CCC enrollee—Henry Rich of Virginia—was dispatched to Camp Roosevelt near Luray, Virginia. Camp Roosevelt, located in the 649,500-acre George Washington National Forest, was the first camp to open. Six additional CCC camps soon followed in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, employing nearly a thousand men to thin overcrowded stands, remove dead chestnut trees, plant saplings, install water systems, build overlooks, and lay stone walls along Skyline Drive.71 There were approximately 120 native species of trees in the southern Appalachians, and the CCC boys were tasked with preserving them, especially the hardwoods.72 An ecological rebound was under way. “Without them,” historian John A. Conners wrote, “it would have taken many years longer and cost far more to implement the conservation measures and construct the public facilities that made Shenandoah National Park a reality.”73
A map showing the distribution of Civilian Conservation Corps camps across the United States, as of August 1933. After just five months’ of existence, the CCC had reached its enrollment quota of 300,000 young men. That month, FDR generated a movable celebration of the CCC by visiting two of the first CCC camps, located in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia.
These CCCers, as historian Neil M. Maher wrote in Nature’s New Deal, “literally built” the recreational infrastructure of Shenandoah National Park “from the ground up” by constructing interpretive centers, campgrounds, picnic areas, hiking paths, and roadways.74 (The WPA also made an important contribution.) In 1926 Congress had authorized the establishment of the national park, a choice parcel of over 180,000 acres in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. But there was a hitch. The commonwealth of Virginia had the arduous task of acquiring remaining land deeds and planning the park. Recalcitrant landowners, legal disputes, land claims, and squatters were more than Congress had bargained for. Furthermore, the NPS wouldn’t “accept title” to the park if people were still living in it. Within a year the NPS evicted three thousand to four thousand people living within the park’s boundaries. “Thus began the removal policy,” historian Dennis E. Simmons wrote, “a highly emotional issue that left scars which have not entirely healed to this day.”75 Not until 1935—when Ickes accepted a fully executed deed from the commonwealth of Virginia conveying 174,429 acres, largely vacated by previous residents—would the national park be officially opened.
Between 1933 and 1938, owing to New Deal care, state park acreage in America increased by 70 percent. When FDR became president, Virginia had only two state parks. Determined to rectify the recreation crisis, Roosevelt sent 107,000 CCC enrollees into the state, and within three years, six more parks would open: Douthat, Westmoreland, Hungry Mother, Fairy Stone, Staunton River, and Seashore (now First Landing).76 The CCC in essence created Virginia’s statewide park system.77 Restoration money and manpower were dispatched to Colonial National Monument in Virginia to ward off wind and tidal erosion of the historic York River and the banks of Jamestown Island on the James River. Two Civil War battlefields of Virginia—Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania—were likewise revamped to attract tourists hungry to understand America’s past.78
Roosevelt insisted that all new state park and national park recreational structures be built in a rustic Americana look that borrowed from the Tennessee log cabin, the Navajo adobe, the Maine saltbox, the Cape Cod half-timbered cottage, and the arched stone bridges of the Lexington-Concord era. Andrew Jackson Downing’s emphasis on the perfect harmony between architecture and nature was Roosevelt’s goal. Architect H. H. Richardson and landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted shared the president’s predilection for using natural materials. But it was the Adirondack school of architecture with its “camp beautiful” ideal that the CCC crews most imitated. The plans, specifications, and philosophical tenets presented by the NPS in its 1935 publication Park Structures and Facilities would set the basic style of construction. In stating the ideals of a rustic camp, Albert H. Good, architectural consultant for the NPS, wrote, “Successfully handled, it is a style which, through the use of native materials in proper scale and through the avoidance of severely straight lines and oversophistication, gives the feeling of having been executed by pioneer craftsmen with limited hand tools. It thus achieves sympathy with natural surroundings and with the past.”79
Although the CCC actually started in Virginia, it was the trans-Mississippi West that the “boys” quickly occupied like an invading army. As Roosevelt saw it, the American West was about a half dozen subregions, all with distinct conservation needs. Shortgrass plains, alpine mountains, geyser basins, plateaus, mesas, canyons, cliffs, badlands, sinks, and saguaro deserts were all components of western ecology that Roosevelt thought deserved attention. In the early and mid-1930s perhaps the most notable CCC infrastructure work in the West was in Colorado, a state ideally suited for a youth corps. Only five states exceeded Colorado’s native forest acreage. Meanwhile, unemployment was at 25 percent. So in the summer of 1933, twenty-nine CCC camps were established. At Rocky Mountain National Park, established in 1915, the CCC built roads at a dizzying elevation of 9,200 feet. The CCC boys set about improving Trail Ridge Road, over the Continental Divide, ten miles of which were at an elevation above eleven thousand feet.80 FDR—who loved the Taconic Parkway—hoped to make the breathtaking route northwest of Denver a similarly evocative roadway.
Many CCC recruits lived in the gateway town of Estes Park and rode red tourist buses (called “woodpeckers” by locals) up to the construction sites. It took six CCC companies, working on a dozen mountain peaks, to help turn FDR’s “Top of the World” road into a forty-eight-mile reality. “A few months ago I was broke,” Charles Battell Loomis wrote in Liberty magazine in 1934. “At this writing I am sitting on top of the world. Almost literally so, because National Park No. 1 CCC Camp near Estes Park . . . is 9,000 feet up. Instead of holding down a park bench or pounding the pavements looking for work, today I have work, plenty of good food, and a view of the sort that people pay money to see.”81
Working at such high altitudes was physically daunting. Shortness of breath, altitude sickness, dehydration, and nosebleeds were commonplace. An infestation of the mountain pine beetle was devastating the national park’s stands of ponderosa and pine. CCC manpower helped peel the bark off 11,194 trees to expose Dendroctonus ponderosae larvae to the elements.82 These CCCers also cut more than a hundred miles of hiking trails, stocked lakes and rivulets with 1.5 million trout, laid telephone lines across mountains, and transformed an old lodge into a museum. CCC manpower made Rocky Mountain National Park a tourist destination comparable to Yellowstone or Yosemite.
In the state of New York, enlistment in the CCC began on April 7 and 8 with 1,800 young unemployed men, all carrying welfare agency certificates, showing up at the Army Building at 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. Cheers and renditions of “Happy Days Are Here Again” were heard. From the Wall Street area, these initial New York City recruits were bused to Fort Slocum in Westchester County, Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and a segregated African American CCC camp at Fort Dix in New Jersey.83
No one was happier about the boldly interventionist CCC than Pinchot. Rolling up his shirtsleeves, he helped organize CCC camps in Pennsylvania’s Poconos, Penn’s Woods, and Alleghenies. In a very real way, the CCC was an extension of Pinchot’s Pennsylvania program for “human conservation through safeguarding nature.” Because of his influence, Pennsylvania soon boasted the second-highest number of CCC camps of any state, trailing only California. Protected forest, amid the hustle and human destiny around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, were Pinchot’s priorities. Federally funded historical restoration projects took place at Fort Necessity and Valley Forge. Thirty-seven new fire observation towers were erected in state parks.87 Ickes, an ardent supporter of the NAACP, dispatched an African American CCC company (led by black military officers) to landscape and renovate Gettysburg National Military Park with the hope that the experience would foster pride in the unit. The company enhanced Adams County, Pennsylvania, for tourists interested in the Civil War.88
Under Pinchot’s watchful eye, CCC Company S-73, assigned to the Allegheny Mountains, did brilliant conservation work, planting thousands of trees, excavating recreational lakes, and building Parker Dam in Clearfield County. Man-made lakes were created at Greenwood Furnace and Parker Dam, and family cabins were built at Moshannon and Clear Creek. “As I see it there is no single domestic step that can be taken that will mean so much to the future of the United States as this one,” Pinchot wrote to the president, “and at the same time none that will meet with such universal approval.”89
Pinchot lauded Roosevelt’s CCC plan to reduce unemployment, but hoped that around one quarter of the enrollees would come directly from the forested regions and rural communities where the new reforestation camps would be situated. Rural recruitment, Pinchot reasoned, would ensure that America’s public forests were tended by young men with local affinities. He refused to believe, for example, that a jobless man from Philadelphia was better suited to cut trails in Cook Forest State Park in western Pennsylvania than a youngster from nearby Oil City or Clarion. “I hardly need to tell you how much I am delighted with the President’s reforestation program,” Pinchot wrote to Howe at the White House. “There is just one question that I would like to raise, if I may. I understand enrollment of the men will be largely from the cities, and I am rather fearful that working city men only in the forests of Pennsylvania will result in millions of acres of forest being burned over through dissatisfaction of our native population, many thousands of whom are out of work.”90 The administration made sure 55 percent of the CCC enrollees were from rural areas.
What Roosevelt hoped to do by employing youths, whether rural or urban, was to reduce juvenile delinquency in cities. The New Republic went so far as to editorialize that the CCC was Roosevelt’s way to “prevent the nation’s male youth from becoming semi-criminal hitchhikers.”91 Education was a key component of the camps.92 Once the young men were officially enrolled, they would take classes in “Forestry,” “Soil Conservation,” and “Conservation of Natural Resources.”93 CCCers were further required only to do calisthenics, polish their shoes, brush their teeth clean, and maintain a sense of humor. For all the emphasis on land stewardship ethics, however, thousands of CCCers never actually engaged in “green” tasks. “I worked as a carpenter,” Ray Condor recalled, speaking for many. “And a CAT operator, and I [did] welding up here in the shop. I ran the drag line to haul the cement to [the] tank. . . . I helped slope. We had to shovel and load the rocks up on the switchbacks and dynamite rocks. That was most of the work.”94
Chores and responsibilities ranged from the heroic (building the biggest log cabin in Minnesota) to the mundane (picking up roadkill in Tennessee) to the public health–oriented (eradicating rabbit ticks in Minnesota). Each CCC camp provided basic medical services, including inoculations against typhoid fever and smallpox. A “Camp Life Reader and Workbook” was assigned to the “boys” early on to determine literacy.95 “We didn’t really have training,” Floyd Fowler, a recruit from Silver City, Nevada, recalled, “We didn’t really require a lot of training. We just followed instructions and they had men that knew what they were doing along with us and they just set the example and we just followed them. There wasn’t very much technical knowledge involved.”96
From inauguration day forward, Roosevelt ably projected the image of an openhearted liberal who cared mightily about the downtrodden, struggling families, and the homeless. Increasing the size and scope of the federal government to alleviate suffering blindsided the GOP opposition. The CCC was part of this expansion. The public response was so favorable to the CCC that on October 1, 1933, Roosevelt instituted a second period of enrollment. Three months later, 300,000 CCCers were serving America. In 1935, Congress renewed the program, allowing participation to be over 350,000.97
If Roosevelt had any worries about the procedural aspects of the CCC it was the extraordinary power the War Department had in processing the agency’s applicants, training enrollees, organizing camp locations, and then transporting them to far-flung camps across the country. After all, in Germany, Chancellor Adolf Hitler had initiated a fascistic military program of his own (Hitlerjugend—“Hitler Youth”), which engaged young men, who were allegedly “rotting helplessly” on the streets, to work on community forestry and land rehabilitation. Hitler Youth were also trained in military activities, with aggressive behavior strongly encouraged. Not wanting his “boys” to be compared to Hitler’s social engineering schemes, Roosevelt urged reporters not to refer to CCC enlistment centers as “cantonments” and encouraged the public to think of the CCC’s work sites as “camps”—like Boy Scout camps. He repeatedly stressed that the crucial functions were overseen by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture.98 The War Department only helped train enrollees and handled logistic concerns at the camps. And unlike U.S. military personnel, CCCers could initially sign up for only six-month stints. Later they could re-up for a total of eighteen months, but after that time expired they had to leave the CCC for six months before they could reenlist.99
VI
In Missouri, Roosevelt had former Senator Harry B. Hawes helping him in the field. The main CCC office for the state was in Saint Louis. Notices about the CCC were posted in shopwindows throughout downtown, on the Mississippi River docks of LaCleide’s Landing, and in the rough-and-tumble tenement neighborhoods of Columbus Square. Applicants were rejected if they suffered from a serious illness or had a criminal record. “No matter to what camp you are sent you’ll probably have to learn to use a pick and an ax, to dig with a shovel,” a CCC brochure stated. “And pull one end of a crosscut saw and build fences, to move rocks and do all sorts of hard labor. And, count on it, sometimes it will get monotonous.”100
When CCC acceptance letters arrived by mail or telegram or even word of mouth in Missouri, whoops and celebrations u
sually occurred. Overnight a young man went from being destitute to being a breadwinner. Each Saint Louis enrollee was instructed to first report to the U.S. Army post at either Jefferson Barracks in Lemay, Missouri, or Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. While there is no proper documentation of how precisely the CCC office in Saint Louis selected the first twenty-five thousand men from Missouri, a distinctive pattern emerged. Most Missouri CCCers were skinny as a rail, Caucasian, averaging an eighth-grade education, and lacking meaningful work experience. After passing a strict physical evaluation and receiving vaccinations, they were clay ready to be molded.
The Ozark Mountains, with their sublime natural beauty, were the first priority. That spring, three state parks—Sam A. Baker, Meramec, and Roaring River—were selected as prototype sites. Although the Ozarks’ vast pineries, grassy barrens, and prodigious burr oaks had been heavily damaged by heedless farming and timbering, the New Deal was going to bring ecological glory back to southern Missouri.
Within a year, over four thousand CCCers, directed by the National Park Service, fanned out in twenty-two CCC camps in fifteen Missouri state parks, the majority in the Ozarks. A total of 342 examples of “rustic architecture” erected in these state parks by the CCC have been listed in the National Register of Historic Places as of 2015—an astounding testimonial to the craftsmanship of the CCCers. Aesthetically, the stone bridge at Bennett Spring, Missouri, may be the most perfect masonry work the CCC produced.101
Tainting this fine record of achievement in Missouri, however, was the institutionalization of racial prejudice. It had been a Confederate state during the Civil War and bigotry against African Americans was still very potent in 1933. Although Roosevelt had originally considered integrating the CCC, the program wasn’t sold to Congress as a civil rights crusade. Nor did he want to offend his Democratic political base in the South—which had been instrumental in his election—by attacking Jim Crow. Early on the CCC created separate companies for African American enrollees; 250,000 blacks enrolled in 150 “all-Negro” CCC companies throughout the nation from 1933 to 1942. The president’s uninspired “separate but equal” principle regarding the CCC infuriated civil rights groups. When NAACP leader Thomas Griffith complained about the lack of integration in the CCC, Tennessean Robert Fechner shot back that segregation was not, in fact, discrimination.
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