Civilian Conservation Corps
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of the federal government of the United States organized job creation scheme for young unemployed people in the years 1933 to 1942. The CCC was the most comprehensive program under the New Deal , the President Franklin D. Roosevelt , the Great Depression as a result the Great Depression fought. Over a nine-year period, 3,463,766 volunteers worked on public infrastructure under the guidance of Army Reserve officers . The program ended after the United States entered World War II . When there was no longer any need due to the conscription to the army and the concentration on the war economy, the Congress made no more funds available for the financial year 1942/43, and there was no formal decision to discontinue the work.
The CCC workers were housed in work camps for a year , were given board, lodging and a salary of at least $ 30 a month, of which $ 25 had to be sent to family members in their homeland. Each camp was assigned to a federal agency that coordinated the projects. The focus was on road construction, river fortifications, reforestation , the construction of fire observation towers in forest areas and the fight against forest fires, tourist infrastructure measures in national parks, state parks and other protected areas and memorials, irrigation systems for cattle breeding and draining of wetlands for agriculture.
History and organization
The presidential campaign in 1932 was under the influence of the world economic crisis in the United States in the form of the Great Depression , and the catastrophic drought in the Dust Bowl of the Midwest . The incumbent, Republican Herbert Hoover , had said time and again for years that the worst was over, the nation on its way to prosperity. Against it stood Roosevelt, the governor of New York , the most populous state, was. He announced a New Deal with the American people and massive investments in public goods. In New York , he organized small-scale labor camps for the unemployed, as other states did. Roosevelt won 42 of the then 48 US states and assumed the office of President on March 4, 1933. The Emergency Conservation Work Act was tabled on March 27, until March 31, both Houses of Congress agreed and that same day signed it by Roosevelt, the first participants enrolled on April 7th. The law authorized the federal government to send up to 250,000 young unemployed people from major cities to the regions most severely affected by soil erosion , where afforestation and windbreak strips became the first task of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The logistics of the task could only be handled by the army . The Ministry of War appointed regular officers and reserve officers to head the camps on an ad hoc basis, initially had tent cities built, which were later to be expanded, made bases available and resorted to military powers to organize the rail transport of participants from the population centers in the East and the Great Lakes in the agricultural regions from Oklahoma to Texas to New Mexico . The Department of Labor provided the staff for the Admission and Selection Offices, the Department of the Interior and the subordinate agencies National Park Service , General Land Office and Grazing Service and Bureau of Reclamation , as well as the Department of Agriculture and its subordinate United States Forest Service , and others - on the run At the time a total of 25 - federal authorities took over the selection of projects and the technical management.
In the years that followed, local construction companies or the United States Army Corps of Engineers turned the camps into shack settlements, and the program was expanded across the United States. There were camps in all 48 states, the territories of Alaska , Hawaii , Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico , albeit to a very different extent . The Emergency Conservation Work program was headed by Robert Fechner, a trade unionist. A representative from the Ministry of Labor headed the Emergency Conservation Work Council as an advisory body. All federal authorities involved were represented in the committee.
Attendees
At the beginning of the program there were tight conditions for the participants, which were later relaxed somewhat. Applicants had to be male, between 18 and 25 years old, and their family - mostly because their father was unemployed - had to be dependent on social assistance. Therefore almost 80% of the wages were not paid to the participant, but to his family at home. For Indians , under the administration of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, separate camps were set up, for which different age limits were applied and which were located on the reservations themselves, so that their work benefited the peoples directly. Unemployed WWI veterans were also exempt from the age limit. Around 250,000 participants were Afro-American , they were deployed in around 150 purely “black” camps, separated by race . As for other population groups, the CCC also had a quota for Afro-Americans that corresponded to ten percent of the population, but is now considered racist discrimination because blacks were disproportionately affected by the economic crisis and made up a higher proportion of social assistance recipients. A parallel program for young women was set up in 1937, but by 1942 it had just under 9,000 participants.
Many participants came to the camps in poor medical and general condition. In the first three months, they gained an average of more than 5 kg due to a secure diet and physical work. From the beginning of 1934, initially unofficially, and from 1937 on as part of the program, educational measures for the participants stood alongside their work: The spectrum ranged from courses at college to primary school level, with over 40,000 illiterate people learning to read and write in the programs. Criticism came from the unions, who feared that their members' jobs would be squeezed out by cheaper CCC workers. They enforced that CCC participants should not learn any qualified professional activities and should not operate heavy machinery. However, many camps also offered practical courses in repairing agricultural machinery and automobiles, as well as many activities in the agricultural and food industries. In collaboration with the Works Progress Administration , another New Deal project, unemployed academics taught in some CCC camps. Under pressure from the trade unions, many camps hired local residents to convey local needs and guide the participants.
Projects
The CCC program began with afforestation and soil protection in the Dust Bowl of the southern Great Plains . Work followed to prevent forest fires across the United States, with an emphasis on national forests in the west. CCC camps laid forest roads, built observation towers and fight fires themselves. As a result, the program expanded the work to include road construction and the laying of telephone lines in rural areas. River banks were fortified, wetlands were drained and irrigation systems were created. CCC workers opened up national parks , national monuments and state parks for the tourism that emerged in the 1920s. In addition, they were active in the restoration and reconstruction of architectural monuments. Another activity was the establishment of fish farms in all parts of the country, in which offspring were bred to be stocked with fish species that no longer reproduce naturally due to dams and other hydraulic engineering measures.
In the course of 1940 and increasingly in 1941, the United States began to rearm in response to the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and CCC camps were now also set up on military bases to create airfields and training areas. Already in the course of 1941 the demand for places in the CCC dropped massively, in 1942 after the USA entered the war and the young men were drafted into the army, the program expired.
effect
Soil erosion was reduced on over 160,000 km² , around 200,000 km of roads were laid, 46,854 bridges built, almost 145,000 km of telephone lines laid in rural regions, over 3,000 km² with around three billion trees reforested, 3470 observation towers built for forest fires, eight million man-days for fighting expended by forest fires. Hiking trails, picnic areas, and campsites have been created in around 800 state parks . In the event of natural disasters, new camps were immediately set up to help with emergency measures and reconstruction: for example, during the 1937 floods in Vermont and New York as well as in the Ohio River valley . The winter of 1936/37 in Utah was unusually harsh and around 100,000 freely grazing sheep and thus the economic basis of many ranchers were saved from blizzards by CCC participants .
From the outset, the programs were supported by an overwhelming majority of the population. A poll in California showed 97 percent support, even among Roosevelt's political opponents of the Republican Party there were 67 percent supporters. A judge at the Boys' Court in Chicago cited the CCC program as the reason for the 50 percent decrease in crime. Roosevelt planned to reduce the program in the course of 1936 in order to sell himself as thrifty in the use of taxes in the election campaign. So much criticism came from every state that he was forced to receive the CCC in full.
The program cost around $ 1000 per person per year for room, board, material, organization and wages. Of this, $ 300 went to the participants' relatives at home, so the direct economic impact was spread across rural and urban areas.
Roosevelt saw the parallels with the simultaneous Reich Labor Service in National Socialist Germany and was informed about the project by the embassy in Berlin in order to learn from experience. To critics who described the program as "fascist" or "socialist", Roosevelt and Fechner reacted by excluding any military training and reducing the tasks of the army to organizational functions.
Follow-up projects
Due to its success, the CCC became a model for later projects that took up individual or several aspects of the CCC.
1961 founded President John F. Kennedy , the Peace Corps for young adults on development aid work -projects abroad. Members of the Peace Corps often already have the training necessary for their work. The AmeriCorps has been organizing volunteer missions in the USA since 1994 , following the previous organization Volunteers in Service to America since 1965 and the National Civilian Community Corps since 1992 .
literature
- John A. Salmond: The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942; a New Deal case study . Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1967 (also online: Civilian Conservation Corps )
- John C. Paige: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service, 1933–1942 - An Administrative History . National Park Service, 1985 (also online: Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service )
- Kiran Klaus Patel : Soldiers of Work - Labor Services in Germany and the USA, 1933–1939 / 1942 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003 (also dissertation: Humboldt University, Berlin 2001), ISBN 3-525-35138-0 .
- Joseph M. Speakman: At Work in Penn's Woods: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2006, ISBN 9780271030388 .
- Robert D. Leighninger Jr .: Long-Range Public Investment - The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal. SC, University of South Carolina Press, Colombia 2007, ISBN 978-1-57003-663-7 .
Web links
- Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy - nonprofit dedicated to remembering and researching the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Individual evidence
- ^ Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute: African Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps ( Memento April 5, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Virginia Department for Conservation and Recreation: Civilian Conservation Corps Museum
- ^ Chief Credit Given CCC in Halving Chicago Crime . In: New York Times , Oct 2, 1936, 6
- ↑ All information: CCC Legacy: Brief History
- ^ Kiran Klaus Patel: Learning from the Enemy? In: Transatlantica. Revue d'Études Américaines 5 (2005)