Forester explains tree-planting techniques to Civilian Conservation Corps workers c. 1934.
Just a month and a day after taking the oath of office in March 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, the first federal jobs program of the New Deal. Within four months, 250,000 18- to 25-year-olds had enrolled. Later the age spread was expanded and ranged from 17 to 28. Workers were paid $30 a month, $25 of which was sent to their families or placed in a savings account. Over nine years, 3 million young men participated in the program.
The War Department ran the CCC camps and supervised training, transportation and camp construction. The Departments of Agriculture and Interior selected projects. Those included putting up buildings, dams and bridges on nearly 50 refuges and restoring thousands of acres of land. Crews built fences at Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia. At Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, Missouri, the CCC built fish shelters, nesting islands and major spillways, while crushing stone in local quarries to build walkways up Lookout Mountain.
During the life of the program, which ended in 1942, the CCC planted 3 billion trees, constructed more than 800 parks, built service buildings and roadways into remote areas and updated fire-fighting techniques. Some 200,000 African Americans participated, albeit in segregated camps. An additional 85,000 American Indians were part of the CCC's Indian Emergency Conservation Work program. They built schools and roads on reservations and planted shelter belts on federal land. Unlike the rest of the CCC's operations, the IECW trained participants to be carpenters, mechanics, surveyors, truck drivers and radio operators.
Fairness and Accuracy in Media produces a mini-critique of of a few items of media coverage during the week. Here is the latest edition:
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Scott Brown takes a hard-right turn in Senate debate:
What a refreshing Massachusetts Senate debate. From the beginning, when moderator Jim Madigan (thank you WGBY and public television), announced that the questions would be from and based on what the public had sent in, there was hope. When the first question was not about Elizabeth Warren's heritage, but instead about unemployment and job creation, you knew we were in for a debate of substance.
Without that initial attack on Warren to set Brown up, he came off a little discombobulated. Brown was often scattered, incoherent, and thrown off by the time clock, resorting to mixing all his talking points on "bipartisan" and "job creators" into a mish-mash of word salad when he found himself with extra time. That was regardless of the question asked of him. He also failed in controlling the nasty, taking several cheap shots at "Professor" Warren, including blaming her salary and benefits as a Harvard professor for the spiraling costs of higher education.
This debate featured a far more Republican-sounding Brown that any of the previous debates. He railed about tax hikes, on his fealty to Grover Norquist, on the job-killing Obamacare. It was a bizarre juxtaposition to see the guy the tea party was so excited to get elected in 2010 and the "second-most bipartisan senator" fighting for the same brain. The results were bad for Brown.
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