Would Fdr’s Civilian Conservation Corps Work Today?

by Joseph Parish in History, July 22, 2010

How many people are old enough to recollect the Civilian Conservation Corps or as it was abbreviated CCC? No, I was not around at the time; however my father was active in such an agency when he was a young man.

Actually the best program begun as a result of the New Deal was the WPA. This work program begun in 1935 and continued until such time as the nation’s unemployment figures reach acceptable levels. During its functioning it employed many unskilled laborers placing them on various types of construction projects such as roads, playgrounds or park construction. Any skilled labors were placed on projects centered on construction of schools, postal centers or other public buildings. The agency responsible for the WPA also employed a considerable number of white collar workers for historical and cultural employment involving the theater, historical documentations or the government records updating.

In the state of Delaware WPA employees began a project for surveying various historical account, church records and tombstone inscriptions.

At a time when America was facing its greatest unemployment issues these program managed to employ over 3 million young men and another 10,000 women. It was not a handout in any way for these people worked and they worked hard for the money which they received. They dug roads, planted acre after acre of trees and built bridges. They learned how to fight soil erosion, the necessary tricks to cleaning up polluted rivers and they provided a stock of fish for the rivers that they had finished cleaning.

These were useful jobs and not something to use as eye wash to justify giving government funds away. It only seems logical to me that since the CCC and the related programs worked so well for Franklin Delano Roosevelt then why would President Obama not try something similar? This would be a more practical approach to combating the high unemployment rate then handing vast sums of tax payer money over to large corporate concerns. Perhaps if the president were to read more history books he would gather the knowledge to successfully duplicate some of our past theories that have help America become the great nation that it did.