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The Civilian Conservation Corps Experience in the Shenandoah National Park
by PATRICK CLANCY*
WHEN Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933, millions were out of work, breadlines and soup kitchens spread across urban America, and people everywhere found it increasingly difficult to provide for their families. Young men were especially discouraged. Many quit school to earn money for their families, only to find that no jobs existed. Others who took to the road in search of work had to live as hoboes while begging for food or going hungry. These transients worried many Americans, who feared that they were failing to acquire not only employment skills but also values that would bind them to society and strengthen it in the future.l
Roosevelt wanted to alleviate the plight of these young men, but he wanted any such relief effort to be a productive experience that would instill a work ethic and reassure taxpayers that their money was being spent wisely. In addition, the president had been considering ways of reclaiming public land damaged by years of unchecked exploitation. A lifelong conservationist, Roosevelt had experimented with conservation programs while he was governor of New York and hoped to establish a national one during his presidency. He combined these ideas on 5 April 1933, when he created Emergency Conservation Work, which quickly became known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).2
The program was designed to accomplish Roosevelt's objectives by establishing work camps in America's public parks and forests. There young, unmarried men (eighteen to twenty-five years old) would be employed on a variety of conservation projects and at the same time gain valuable work experience in a healthy, outdoor environment. They would receive $30 a month, of which $25 would be sent home to their families. Although unemployment relief and land reclamation were its publicly expressed goals, the CCC had a third, equally important, mission. The president, concerned that joblessness might induce moral decay, hoped to use the CCC to instill a well-defined set of principles in a discouraged, dispirited youth. In his message to Congress requesting the establishment of the CCC, Roosevelt addressed this concern and promised that the program would "eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to...