National
Drinking Water Clearinghouse
West Virginia University
P.O. Box 6064
Morgantown, WV
26506-6064
If
the CCC Built It, It’s Probably Still There
by
Kathy Jesperson
On Tap Associate Editor
On
October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed. Once prosperous Americans were
instantly bankrupt. All of the free spending of the “Roaring ‘20s”
suddenly seemed like the distant past.
Shantytowns—to be forever known as Hoovervilles—sprang up everywhere.
“Orphan trains” carried children from town to town in search of
even the slightest chance at life. Soup and bread lines became a common sight.
By 1931, severe drought hit the Midwest and southern Great Plains. Crops died
and the “Black Blizzards” began. For the next decade, out of work,
hungry, frightened Americans would live through the Great Depression.
The 1932 presidential election, however, was about to bring some welcome relief.
With a landslide of confidence, Americans placed their hopes with Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. They would not be disappointed. During the new president’s
first “Hundred Days,” he promised Americans a “New Deal”
and revitalized the faith of a desperate nation. On March 9, 1933, Roosevelt
called the 73rd Congress into emergency session to seek authorization for
Emergency Conservation Work (ECW). Roosevelt told Congress, “we can take
a vast army of the unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate,
to some extent at least, the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual
and moral stability.” He proposed to recruit thousands of young men,
enroll them into a peacetime army, and send them to battle against the destruction
of the nation’s natural resources.
“We were an army with shovels instead
of guns.”
Angelo Nocera, president,
New Castle, Pennsylvania 125th CCC Alumni Association.
CCC Gets Off to a Fast Start
Congress authorized the ECW under Public Act No. 5. Roosevelt approved the
act known as the Reforestation and Relief Bill on March 31, 1933. The name
was officially changed to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) on June 28,
1937. Roosevelt appointed Robert Fechner as the director of the program. With
the Act in place, Roosevelt promised to have 250,000 men in camps by the end
of July 1933. By April 6, 1933, the CCC enrolled its first 25,000 young men.
The first camp, called “Roosevelt,” was established on April 17,
1933, in George Washington National Forest near Luray, Virginia. Less than
three months later, approximately 300,000 men from all over the country were
settled in close to 1,500 camps. According to Fechner, “it was the most
rapid large scale mobilization of men the country had ever witnessed.”
The CCC was a youth group. Initially, young men between 18 and 25 years old
enrolled in the corps for six-month service stretches. They could re-enlist
for another six-month period, if they wished, for a maximum of two years.
The enrollees received $30 per month. If they had families, they received
$5 on payday and $25 was sent home.
“I had to quit school when I was 17,” says Dominic Cuda, who served
in the CCC in Somerset, Pennsylvania. “My family only had $3 a week.
I could give them the $25, and I would have $5 spending money. We never saw
the $25. It was sent straight home. Roosevelt took people off the streets
and off Relief. He knew what he was doing.”
In 1937, the government lowered the minimum enrollment age to 17 and raised
the maximum age to 28. The government also expanded the program to include
World War I veterans, Native Americans, Eskimos, and local experienced men
who served as trades supervisors. At its peak in 1935, the CCC employed 505,782
young men scattered throughout 2,652 camps.
You’re in the CCC Now
Four different federal agencies administered the CCC. The War Department took
charge of the camps, while the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and Labor,
took charge of the actual works projects and enrolling the young men into
the program.
“When we were in the camp, the Army was in charge of us,” says Perry
L. Cavaricci, who served two years in the CCC in Washington and New Mexico.
“When we were out in the woods, we belonged to Forestry.” Ray Hoyt
notes in We Can Take It, A Short Story of the CCC, that the War Department
was the only government agency organized enough to enroll, clothe, feed, and
supervise several hundred thousand men in camps on short notice.
Although there was some question about Roosevelt’s choice of the Army
to manage the camps, most thought it was a good choice. “Sometimes they
were compared to the Hitler Youth, or the compulsory military training programs
of Europe,” says Larry Sypolt, historian with West Virginia University’s
Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology. “The
only connection to the military was in running the camps. The reason the Army
was placed in charge was because they already had experience in training and
managing people.
“I think that, unknowingly, we prepared for World War II,” he continues.
“Although they did end up doing some national defense projects, it was
a conservation program for unemployed youths. “But the CCC was strictly
a civilian group,” he says. “There were a number of things that
were like the Army. They had reveille in the morning, followed by roll call,
they ate in a mess hall, and had taps at night. All the enrollees were trained
in sort of a mini boot camp, which was a two-week conditioning course to become
physically fit. If they weren’t deemed physically fit, they were sent
home. They had to pass all the physicals and take all the shots just like
when a young man joined the Army. But no one had to stay. They could leave
if they really wanted.
“Sometimes the boys would go AWOL (absent without leave) ,” says
Sypolt. “They usually tried to send the enrollees out of the state that
they lived in to avoid desertions. If the enrollee was stationed too close
to home, he may just take off and go marry his high school sweetheart and
not come back. So being away from home helped the enrollees to become more
worldly.”
Conservation Work Pays Off
Sypolt notes that the CCC did its most good for the young men who were a part
of it, but the conservation work that they performed has not been surpassed
to this day.
“Prior to the inauguration of the CCC, conservation of resources was
allied with the weather, in that there was plenty of talk about both and not
much done about either,” noted Fechner. “It wasn’t that people
weren’t concerned about the environment. They just didn’t know what
to do about it,” says Sypolt. “What the Depression did was give
the president a means of addressing environmental concerns.”
Roosevelt had long been concerned about the country’s national resources
and wanted to find a way to reclaim and preserve them. The Depression furnished
idle manpower. Roosevelt seized the opportunity to put the two together, and
the CCC left the nation with a vastly improved environment. People familiar
with the CCC most often associate it with the beautifully crafted stone and
log structures within state and national forests and parks. Many have said
that long before there was an Earth Day, there was a CCC.
In fact, the CCC may have been the first environmental organization in the
country. But they did much more than that. Under the full impact of the Dust
Bowl in mid-1934, Roosevelt envisioned a greater role for the CCC to counteract
the devastation of the drought. He asked Congress for another $50 million
to employ young men to work on soil erosion prevention and irrigation projects.
So the “CCC boys” set out to plant more than 2.3 billion tree seedlings.
The erosion control work that they did meant that farm production could increase.
The trees that they planted meant that 2.5 million acres of bare, unproductive
land could now produce timber for future use, be turned into a habitat for
wildlife, provide shelter and protection, and prevent the soil from washing
away.
Photo Caption: This Civilian Conservation
Corps (CCC) worker plants trees to help prevent soil erosion. Erosion control
was just one of the many projects that the CCC worked on to counteract the
devastation of the Dust Bowl.
Photo courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association
Tree Army Plants More Than Trees
Besides planting trees, the CCC worked on numerous water projects, bringing
water to places that lacked it before. According to the Civilian Conservation
Corps Continental United States and Outlying Possessions Total Work Completed
During the Period April 1933-June 30,1942 report, they also:
• built enough water storage systems to store 308,260 gallons of water;
• laid more than 5,000 miles of pipe lines for water distribution, storage
facilities, and irrigation systems;
• dug 8,065 wells;
• installed 1,865 drinking fountains;
• assembled 5,082 water control structures;
• constructed 5,935 sewage and waste disposal systems; and
• cleared land for 9,805 reservoirs.
“We were an army with shovels instead of guns,” says Angelo Nocera,
president of the New Castle, Pennsylvania, 125th CCC Alumni Association and
an enrollee from 1938 to 1939 in Virginia. “They called us ‘Roosevelt’s
Tree Army.’”
“We saved the nation’s environment,” he says. “But most
of the ‘Cs’ didn’t know they were saving the environment. They
just knew they had a job and were making money to help their families.”
Ohio Was First in Line
When word got out that the CCC was forming, a number of communities scrambled
to be first in line.
“The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District in Ohio was the first organization
to approach Fechner about setting up CCC camps,” says Sypolt. “Some
said Muskingum officials were waiting in Fechner’s office the first day
he came to work. Because they were first, they got more camps in their area
and more work done.
“It was a real advantage to have a CCC camp located near your town,”
Sypolt continues. “The camps were like small communities, and they would
buy all of their supplies locally—lumber, food, whatever was needed—and
that brought money into the community. Also, the men would go into town on
payday weekends and spend their money. Plus, they were doing a lot of good
work for the environment.
“In West Virginia, CCC camps built almost all the state’s parks,”
he says. “Prior to the CCC, few states had state parks, if any parks
at all. “CCC enrollees dug water lines for fountains, built public toilets,
and built trails,” he explains. “We can thank the CCC for the things
they made available for recreation. Then people didn’t travel like they
do today. No one had recreational vehicles to go camping.”
Water Projects Remedy Drought
Many areas of the country experienced acute water deficiencies during the
Depression because of a severe drought. To remedy the situation, CCC workers
built supplemental storage facilities. In addition, they cleared areas of
timber and debris to prepare for new dam construction. They built new feeder
canals to bring additional water to existing reservoirs and took on flood
control projects. The CCC worked on many projects for the Bureau of Reclamation.
The following list names only a few of the reclamation projects:
• Camp Topock in Arizona built the Parker Dam for the Metropolitan
Water District of Southern California so that water could be stored for Los
Angeles, and it provided flood control. It also served as water storage for
the Colorado River Indian Reservation
and the Parker-Gila Project.
• Camp Island Park in
Idaho cleared a reservoir site for Island Park Dam. The camp’s enrollees
cleared 150 acres of land for the reservoir and 2.5 miles of road. Camps BR
(Bureau of Reclamation) 34 and 35 rehabilitated an irrigation and drainage
project for the Newlands Project, which was one of the first reclamation projects.
• Camp Reno rehabilitated the distribution
system of the Truckee Storage Project for irrigation projects and water storage.
• Camp Deer Creek worked on the Provo
River Project to provide supplemental water supply for farmlands and to enhance
municipal water supplies.
• Texas CCC water projects included
the dam at Meridian and the water storage facility at Palmetto
The projects that the CCC enrollees worked on helped them to gain job skills.
But being a CCC enrollee had other advantages. Enrollees could gain life skills
that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
CCC Aided Social Development
“Social conditions in the 1930s were much different than they are today,”
says Sypolt. “We were a stagnant society. We think, ‘Well, it’s
always been this way.’ But usually there’s some reason that it’s
‘the way it is.’
“Prior to the Depression, people didn’t migrate more than 10 miles
away from home,” Sypolt continues. “Most times, a young man would
work on the family farm. He’d get up in the morning, work in the field,
maybe all day, then come home for dinner. Then maybe he’d go back to
the field to work until it was time to go to bed—often sleeping in the
clothes he’d had on all day—maybe all week.
“The CCC taught these young men how to take care of themselves,”
he says. “They got cleaned up everyday. They changed their clothes. They
got on a regular schedule. They had three square meals a day. They learned
how to interact with other people. They learned social, leadership, and employment
skills they never had the opportunity to learn before.”
“My family only had $3 a week. I could
give them the $25, and I would have $5 spending money. We never saw the $25.
It was sent straight home. Roosevelt took people off the streets and off Relief.
He knew what he was doing.”
Dominic Cuda,
CCC alumnus
Photos by Kathy
Jesperson and Kay Nocera.
We Finally Get To Eat
When the average young man entered the CCC, he weighed about 147 pounds. His
average weight gain in the first month was 11.5 pounds.
“It made a man out me,” says Cavaricci. “And we were treated
really good. We made lots of friends and we all became very close. It was
a good experience for me. I hope what the ‘Cs’ did for me could
be done for young people today.” Tommy Rossi, who worked for the CCC
in Virginia, agrees: “It was a great experience. It was the best program
that the president ever made. They trained us to preserve the country. We
need something like it now. Back then it wasn’t like it is today. Everybody
was poor at the same time, so we helped each other. No one had to steal anything
to survive.”
What’s the legacy?
The CCC’s legacy is the enduring quality of the work that they did. Many
of the high quality structures that they built are still standing. More than
2.5 million men had been enrollees in the 4,500 camps that existed sometime
during the CCC’s nine-year life span. And the country had an environmental
makeover that’s still evident today.
Many CCC alumni now recognize the significance of what they did. But at the
time they were just happy to have a meal.
“I went in to eat,” says Wally Baskeyfield, who was in the CCC from
1938 to 1939. “I went in for six months and then came home. My mother
told me, ‘It isn’t any better,’ so I had to go back. But once
you got out, you had to wait six months to go back in. Seemed like I was never
home then.” Baskeyfield, like many of his CCC buddies, enlisted when
he was under age. He was only 15 when he joined. “I lied,” he says.
“My family needed the money.” Stan Babick also supported his family.
“I had to support my mother because I didn’t have a father. But
the food they fed us was delicious. We ate like kings.”
Edward Janus remembers tough times: “I had to go to the ‘Cs.’
My father wasn’t working, but he finally got a job for the WPA (Works
Progress Administration) . At first we got $5 a month, and then the next time
you joined you got $8.”
Amiel Attisano says that survival during the Depression often depended on
your ingenuity. “I would work in the garden in my bare feet so I could
save my shoes for walking down the road. But we had food from the garden.
I joined the ‘Cs’ because my family came first. Somebody had to
help them.”
Many CCC enrollees still get together to talk about old times, but also to
participate in conservation projects around their community. The CCC alumni
of New Castle, Pennsylvania, meet once a month to discuss new and old projects.
They still have much pride in the work that they did, but they also continue
to use their CCC skills. They post markers around their state to commemorate
sites that the CCC developed or built. They also take on Adopt-a-Highway projects,
plant trees in the state’s parks, and help members who can’t get
around like they used to.
Photo
Capiton: Many Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) alumni still gather every
month to continue the work they started when they were young men. These men
of the New Castle, Pennsylvania, 125th CCC Alumni Association work hard to
place identification markers on CCC-constructed sites around Pennsylvania.
Photo by Kathy
Jesperson.
Of all the New Deal efforts, the CCC was one of the most touted programs of
Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup.” It was officially shut down on
June 30, 1942. Unemployment was no longer an issue, and the nation’s
attention shifted toward the war effort. Most of the “CCC boys”
were now mature, responsible adults and many were shipped out to fight in
WWII.
“Not all the ‘Cs’ served in WWII, but they all served their
country in one way or another,” concludes Nocera.
For more information about the CCC, contact the Civilian Conservation Corps
Alumni Headquarters, 16 Hancock Ave., St. Louis, MO 63125 or P.O. Box 16429,
St. Louis, MO 63125. You also may call them at (314) 487-8666. Or visit their
Web site at www.cccalumni.org/NACCCA.
You may contact Sypolt at:
The Institute
for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology
West Virginia University
P.O. Box 6305
1535 Mileground—Bicentennial House
Morgantown, WV 26506-6305
You also may call him at (304) 293-3704, or email him at lsypolt@wvu.edu
References:
Civilian Conservation Corps Alumni Headquarters 16 Hancock Ave., St. Louis,
MO 63125 or P.O. Box 16429, St. Louis, MO 63125. (314) 487-8666. www.cccalumni.org.
Civilian Conservation Corps Continental United States and Outlying Possessions
Total Work Completed During the Period April 1933–June 30, 1942 Report.
Electronic Library Encyclopedia.com www.encyclopedia.com/articles/05353.html.
Hoyt, Ray. 1935. We Can Take It, A Short Story of the CCC. American
Book Company: New York, New York.
McEntee, J.J. April 1933 through June 30, 1942. Federal Security Agency
Final Report of the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
McBride, Dennis. Hard Work and Far From Home: The Civilian Conservation
Corps at Lake Mead, Nevada.
Pfaff, Christine. 2000. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Civilian Conservation
Corps 1933–1942. Bureau of Reclamation: Denver, Co.
The New Deal Network. newdeal.feri.org/
Rosentreter, Roger L. 2001 Roosevelt’s Tree Army Michigan’s Civilian
Conservation Corps www.sos.state.mi.us/history/museum/techstuf/depressn/treearmy.html.
South Carolina Department of Archives and Public Programs Document, Packet
No. 4. The Civilian Conservation Corps in South Carolina 1933–1942.
Texas Parks & Wildlife, 4200 Smith School Road, Austin, TX 78744 (800)
792-1112
www.tpwd.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/imagemap/butnpark?29,27.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation 1938. Civilian Conservation
Corps Handbook.
Van West, Carroll. 2001. Tennessee’s New Deal Landscape, A Guidebook.
University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville, TN.