This is a quote from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the FDR Memorial in DC. Those who would like to hold power in our government today would be well-advised to keep this thought in mind:
And this, the site of the nation's first CCC camp at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia:
I could call this diary How I Spent My Summer Vacation, I suppose, since I visited the FDR Presidential Library (Hyde Park, NY), the FDR Memorial (in DC), and the Shenandoah National Park (home to the nation's very first Civilian Conservation Corps/CCC crew.) I was groundtruthing what I've been researching all year.
Vast unemployment ... is the greatest menace to our social order.
My common sense tells me that people tend to do better if they have something useful to do. Some kind of right livelihood. On the heels of work/relief projects undertaken while he was Governor of New York, President Roosevelt was keen to get something similar going on the National level.
And get going they did. Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4th, 1933. A scant two weeks later, the new President presented legislation to the Congress to create the CCC. A mere four weeks after that, that first CCC crew reported for work. No kidding!
And they didn't take long at it. This photograph and caption came from the website of the Shenandoah National Park, where the nation's first Civilian Conservation Corps went to work.
The details of that legislative efficiency, unimaginable in the present day, is rather beyond the scope of this story. Except to observe that it happened, a lament the dilly-dallying going on today. There's a few other points about the Depression-era stimulus plan (aka New Deal) that modern-day policy-makers might benefit from taking to heart.
Those guys got to work in a hurry, and by July 1, more than 300,000 others around the country were also at work doing conservation work in the landscape nationwide. In August, the President made an excursion out to visit the CCC's progress, complete with newsreel crews.
There was a great sense of urgency that the nation see itself as getting back to work. The emphasis of the enterprise was on labor. Physical labor.
Getting a quarter million enrollees (aged 18-25, but many younger boys lied to get in) to work in an organized fashion in but a few months was not a trivial undertaking. There were camps to set up:
A bunch of young men who came of age when there was little gainful employment to be found were hardly likely to know how to pull such a feat off. And, in fact, the only entity with the logistical know-how to pull this off was the army. They built and ran the camps, which had a decidedly military tone to them - starting each morning at 6 with reveille and mustering around the flag for attendance. And, in fact, many of the men with that responsibility were members of the Army Reserve, and unemployed themselves. (They amounted to roughly 10% of the CCC work force.)
The Army was only in charge in the camps. The work at Shenandoah was supervised by the National Park Service. (The story of the how the land came to fall under the purview of the NPS must wait for a later entry in this series.) And work they did! Mostly hard physical labor. Another 10% of the work force was called Local Experienced Men, who supervised the never-before-employed young men to learn the various trades contributing to the public heritage they built us. The trades included lots of stone work:
The CCC first got on my radar screen on a visit to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon, one of the jewels in the crown of their accomplishments. That's probably the topic a a whole diary all by itself. Anyhow, the park started as a 100-foot road easement, with a few tracts acquired from willing sellers. Crews encamped, and a couple of the major visitor centers in what became the present-day National Park were built. This is under the main westward-facing observation deck at the Big Meadows Lodge:
It's quite a view to the west overlooking the Shenandoah Valley. This railing is outside one of the lodge units at Skyland:
They built the Skyline Drive, 100 miles worth. This from 1996, and how those who have visited it tend to think of it:
But it didn't start out like that. The forest had been rather worked over to fuel smelting in the valley. And then, too there was the chestnut blight that ravaged the landscape. This from the Big Meadows area:
They took all those rot-resistant trees down, and cut them into mostly rough-hewn lumber at an on-site sawmill. The chestnut used for construction throughout the park, such as this "Hemlock" cabin at Skyland (built 1939):
They were made into long shingles, which only remain on a few buildings in the park, including the Boulder Cottage (built 1919) at Skyland.
The CCC built a campground at Big Meadows, too (later expanded.) This is a comfort station under construction there:
They're still in use today:
This original CCC Administration Building is now a ranger station at Piney Ridge, photographed in 1996:
They made furniture, too. For the lodges, and also for the overlooks on the Skyline Drive:
As well as the campgrounds, the picnic areas had water fountains installed. The first ones were made from chestnut trunks, drilled out for pipe to be fed through. None of those remain. The second style was whole boulder fountains:
I read about the fountains, but had to ask a lot of people about them before I tracked some down. A third kind of fountain consisted of masonry. This one's built into the stone guard wall at an overlook:
And really, that 100 miles of highway was the main event for CCC work:
There was grading, and retaining walls:
And even a tunnel at Mary's Rock, towards the northern end of the drive. That and the road cuts required blasting.
That same rock, blasted out, was used for fill, and for the many miles of retaining wall:
I grew up in New England, where the collective unconscious includes the stone walls everywhere. I had a lot of fun contemplating the stone walls throughout the park. This in the Skyland compound:
A lot of the guard walls in the park have been replaced, with a different style of stone work around a concrete barrier core:
I did a little digging and asked a lot of questions to find segments of "old wall":
So, the road was built and graded, but it hardly looks like this today:
There was tons of landscaping work. Those who have taken the time to study this in detail say that every foot of the 100-mile Skyline Drive is landscaped. Nothing is "wild." They graded the road cuts:
Installing soil retention structures to prevent erosion.
They ran nurseries (and purchased from commercial nurseries, which helped keep a lot of them in business) and transplanted trees:
In fact, the reason the CCC was dubbed "FDR's Forest Army" is because they planted, literally, billions of trees. Much of that in conjunction with another New Deal agency, the Soil Conservation Service (still extant today, renamed Natural Resources Conservation Service/NRCS):
It was kind of a kick visiting the park, looking for the many small features the CCC built, like culverts:
And I've not even mentioned the Appalachian Trail work! If it weren't for the New Deal's CCC, SC Gov. Mark Sanford would have had to find a different excuse for running off to Argentina. Before and after construction work:
Being away from the road, it was all done by manual labor - sweat and muscle (well, that and the occasional stick of dynamite):
That's a breakneck tour of the work of the CCC in the Shenandoah National Park, home of the first CCC camp. Actually, the first three CCC camps. I'm not sure the process of bringing today's unemployed youth into the fold of productive and functional society is at core of today's "stimulus" projects like was the case with the CCC.
Oh, and this: The folks on the Right are fond of arguing that it was only WWII that brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression. That the various public works projects of the period, and the employment programs, did nothing to help end the Depression.
I don't buy that for a minute. And besides, every CCC boy had most of his salary sent back to his family as part of the terms of service. It kept a lot of very marginal families afloat at least to a minimal, modest degree.
But leaving that aside? Over 90% of the CCC boys (that's what they were called) went to war. The group discipline and physical toughness of the Corps experience had a lot to do with the successful WWII war effort.
I want to explore all the various things that had to come together, and how it happened so quickly. But this diary's plenty long already. So, I'll go into that in Part II of this story, due next week - same time, same station.
Previous entries in the New Deal Series: