The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Negro

Abstract

authorizing the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, an agency designed to help relieve poverty and provide training for young men by employing them in conservation work on the nation's forests, parks, and farms.' The new President had experience and a personal interest in conservation of land and resource programs. His own Hyde Park estate was a laboratory in forestry techniques and as governor of New York he had fostered a scheme to put ten thousand unemployed men to work in the state forests and parks.2 Now, the social chaos of the Depression gave him the opportunity to institute a national plan. The CCC became one of the most popular and successful of all New Deal experiments. Before it was abolished in 1942 more than two and one half million young men passed through its ranks,8 a major battle was fought against the ravages of a century of waste and depredation upon the land, and in regenerating the land the enrollees improved their own condition. Life in the CCC brought corpsmen better health and a second chance to get the education and training necessary for better employment. It also made better Americans. City and farm youth worked side by side. New Yorkers spent time in Iowa and South Carolinians in Vermont.4 The result was a more national outlook and a greater understanding of the American people. The present purpose, however, is not to enumerate the CCC's suc