This Week in History
March 18 - March 24, 1933
The Civilian Conservation Corps
March 2010
This article was originally published in the EIR Magazine’s Electronic Intelligence Weekly as part of an ongoing series.
Raymond Moley, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's closest advisers, wrote in his book, The First New Deal, that he considered March 18 the beginning of the second phase of the "Hundred Days" of emergency action. With the Congress having passed the first basic banking reforms, to re-establish confidence in the system, and with the far-reaching agricultural reform bill on the table, the President turned to the question consuming the interest of the nation: jobs.
 View enlargement National Archives A Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in Marsing, Idaho, in 1941. The crew is laying concrete pipe. Roosevelt’s CCC program should be revived today, to give young people the opportunity to become productive members of society. |
President Roosevelt was acutely aware of the fact that there were anywhere between 11 and 17 million Americans unemployed, most of them with no resources available to them. One thousand homes per day were being foreclosed on. The standard array of local charities, and the budgets of municipalities and states, had simply found their cupboards bare. Given the collapse of productive activity, tax revenues had fallen through the floor. Something had to be done immediately.
Labor Secretary Frances Perkins reported the President as putting it this way: "We have to do it. It is like putting all you've got into stopping up the hole in the dike. You have to keep that hole from getting any larger. We must do what we can at this time. We haven't any more time."
Overall, the President was proceeding from the philosophy he outlined in his "Forgotten Man" campaign speech of 1932: "These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid...."
Unemployment Relief
Thus, at the March 18 conference with his closest advisers, FDR called for his staff to formulate major legislative measures on the job crisis. From their deliberations came the following Presidential message to Congress, issued March 21:
To the Congress:
- It is essential to our recovery program that measures immediately be enacted aimed at unemployment relief. A direct attack on this problem suggests three types of legislation.
- The first is the enrollment of workers now by the Federal Govenrment for such public employment as can be quickly started and will not interfere with the demand for or the proper standards of normal employment.
- The second is grants to States for relief work.
- The third extends to a broad public works labor-creating program.
- With reference to the latter I am now studying the many projects suggested and the financial questions involved. I shall make recommendations to the Congress presently.
- In regard to grants to States for relief work, I advise you that the remainder of the appropriation of last year will last until May. Therefore, and because a continuance of Federal aid is still a definite necessity for many States, a further appropriation must be made for the end of this special session.
- I find a clear need for some simple Federal machinery to coordinate and check these grants of aid. I am, therefore, asking that you establish the office of Federal Relief Administrator, whose duty it will be to scan requests for grants and to check the efficiency and wisdom of their use.
- The first of these measures which I have enumerated, however, can and should be immediately enacted. I propose to create a civilian conservation corps to be used in simple work, not interfering with normal employment and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control and similar projects. I call your attention to the fact that this type of work is of definite practical value, not only through the prevention of great present financial loss, but also as a means of creating future national wealth. This is brought home by the news we are receiving today of vast damage caused by floods on the Ohio and other rivers.
- Control and direction of such work can be carried on by existing machinery of the departments of Labor, Agriculture, War and Interior.
- I estimate that 250,000 can be given temporary employment by early summer if you give me authority to proceed within the next two weeks.
- I ask no new funds at this time. The use of unobligated funds, now appropriated for public works, will be sufficient for several months.
- This enterprise is an established part of our national policy. It will conserve our precious natural resources. It will pay dividends to the present and future generations. It will make improvements in national and state domains which have been largely forgotten in the past years of industrial development.
- More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work. The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work. We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability. It is not a panacea for all the unemployment but it is an essential step in this emergency. I ask its adoption.
A Glance Ahead
Because of the President's leadership, and the sense of emergency in the country, what became known as the CCC was passed and put into effect within a mere eight days. This program, which ultimately involved 2.5 million young men during its lifetime, carried out major reforestation, fish-stocking, upgrading of national parks and battlefields. It was often informally called Roosevelt's "Tree Army."
The other aspects of the President's job program were to be more contentious. We will pick them up next week.
