← History That Doesn't Suck
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- [00:02]
Greg Jackson
It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to the show. See terms@discover.com credit card if you've been.
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Lindsay Cormack
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Greg Jackson
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Greg Jackson
Get them delivered to their home each month. Take our free quiz@joinmochi.com and use code AUDIO40 at checkout for $40 off your first month of membership. Welcome to History that Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor Greg Jackson, and as in the classroom, my goal here is to make rigorously researched history come to life. As your storyteller, each episode is the result of laborious research with no agenda other than making the past come to life as you learn. If you'd like to help support this work, receive ad free episodes, bonus content and other exclusive perks. I invite you to join the HTDS membership program. Sign up for a seven day free trial today at htdspodcast.com membership or click the link in the episode notes. Hello my friends, and welcome to an epilogue of History that Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor Greg Jackson. Now, if you're new to HTDS and uninitiated, if you will, keep in mind that epilogues are a moment where we take a break from the narrative storytelling that we've been doing for several episodes. As I tell a continuous, effectively audiobook that is the story of America. So think of this epilogue episode as kind of a book club meeting that provides additional insights. We officially entered the Great depression with episode 170, beginning with the stock market crash of October 1929. In episodes 171 through 176, I've been narrating the aftermath of this worst of all American financial crises, made worse by the environmental disaster known as the Dust Bowl. This, of course, is the story of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal for the American people. If you haven't listened to those episodes, that's okay. We're going to summarize the New Deal broadly today, then dive into one specific program known as the ccc. But you'll definitely want to go back and listen to those last few episodes to get a full picture and hear some compelling stories of a truly historic period of struggle, iconic leadership, and the resiliency of the American people. We'll return to more stories from the 1930s. Soon our upcoming storytelling episodes will literally be digging into it. I'm talking about humongous construction projects, including the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, and other enduring engineering achievements. Today, though, I'm happy to bring you two conversations that will help us review the legacy of the New Deal. First, I'm joined by Professor Lindsay Cormack, who is an Associate professor of Political Science and the Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology. She's a respected expert on government and the perfect person to join me for this conversation because the history of the New Deal is actually a great lesson in the US Government being incredibly responsive to its people. In other words, it's government that doesn't suck. Or at least that's a theory that Professor Cormac and I will ruminate on. The second conversation is between Professor Cormack and Neil Maher, who is a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. Professor Marr wrote an excellent book about one of the most popular and successful programs of the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which we briefly covered in episode 171. You'll also hear them briefly discuss the origins of the American conservation movement, which we also covered back in episode 114 during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. So it's a jam packed episode today of insights that I'm delighted to share with you. But just one more bit of housekeeping before we get into these conversations. I'm going to make an assumption that you're listening to this epilogue because you're curious to learn more. You like to hear the stories behind the history I tell in htds. If I'm right about that, then I invite you to go to our website htdspodcast.com to check out our book recommendations, live tour dates, and our membership program. HTDS will always be widely available, supported by ads. However, we also have the HTDS membership program which offers ad free episodes, episodes delivered early, plus extra stories and deep dives. For example, there's a short story narrative by me about a day in the life of one of the first Civilian Conservation Corps camps. You can access these extras and more by visiting hgdspodcast.com membership or by clicking the link in the episode notes to start a free seven day trial. Welcome, Professor Lindsey Cormack.
- [05:09]
Lindsay Cormack
Thank you.
- [05:10]
Greg Jackson
So let's just dive right into this, huh? Franklin Delano Roosevelt becomes the 32nd President of the United States. It's March 4, 1933, and he inherits a nation in the midst of its worst ever financial crisis. Unemployment is peak, it's at 24.9%. We have well into the eight digits of unemployment. Banks are failing left and right. There have been 5,000 banks that have crashed since the Great Depression began back in October of 1929. It is so bad that Americans are quite literally taking their money, their gold, their precious whatever, putting it in coffee tins and burying it in their yard or stashing it underneath their mattress. And I mean, how insane is it that you've got Americans trusting the underside of their mattress more than a banking institution?
- [06:01]
Lindsay Cormack
I mean, that might seem insane, but since like 1886, Congress had tried 150 times to make something that we now know as the FDIC and they were unsuccessful until 1933. So it wasn't that insane for the people making those choices.
- [06:15]
Greg Jackson
This is a very different America, Right. It seems insane to us, or let me say a very different economic system. I mean, it's capitalism, it's democracy. It's those things that we look at and say that's America at its essence. Right. But this is a major shift as we hit the New Deal and try to stave off this Great Depression.
- [06:35]
Lindsay Cormack
We absolutely are. And there's differences between how the government is meant to interact with banks and how people are meant to interact with themselves and with the government. It's sort of unimaginable to us now. Everyone has, since we've all been alive, had insurance on our bank deposits. That wasn't the case then. And so this really is a transformation of how government's going to interact with banking.
- [06:55]
Greg Jackson
I think I want to just hammer at this point. You know, we have recessions. I mean, I talked about that in so many episodes. But we got into the history of a number of recessions really rapidly. And former presidents before we get to Hoover. Presidents didn't really get beaten up for not jumping in to save the day. I mean, you have some moments where things occur. But even as we get into the Progressive Era, it's actually Wall street that's seen as needing to charge in. We have famously, John Pierpont Morgan is, you know, he's either your, your villain by one narrative or he's the hero who basically floats the American government. And no one's looking at this, thinking that this is not working. This looks like a viable system. But the Great Depression, when one in four Americans in. In 1933 cannot find a job, that.
- [07:43]
Lindsay Cormack
Is one of the reasons that we see things like the socialist and the Communist Party surge in their membership. People are finding out that the, like, traditional systems, the Democrats and the Republicans that they're used to dealing with aren't giving them solutions that they want. And so we do start seeing people actually sign up for these things. That's sort of unimaginable to us today. But the ranks climbed pretty precipitously back then.
- [08:03]
Greg Jackson
Yeah. Understanding that level of crisis that I think is so lost on us today. I mean, many of us recall the Great recession of, you know, 0809, and we look at that as bad time. And I'm not dismissing that. I graduated from college in 2008 with a history degree. Right. I sat there at that precipice going, grad school sounds like a great option. Staring down the idea of trying to get a job in that economy versus continuing with grad school. It was definitely an aspect that made me go, okay, I should definitely stay in the academy at this juncture. But again, I don't mean to minimize. But it's nothing compared to the devastation, the turmoil, the doubt that is seeping into almost every single corner of the United States where you truly do have Americans questioning, is our system viable? Is democracy? Is capitalism functioning? So, you know, when FDR comes in, you don't have the luxury of retreating to the traditional. Not when the house is on fire the way that it was in 1933.
- [09:09]
Lindsay Cormack
And when we think about what that fire is, the Great Recession that we lived through was bad. It lasted about 18 months. We had about 10% of our population that was unemployed. But when you think about things like the Consumer Price Index, it still went up, but only modestly at like 1.6%. When you contrast that to the Great depression, it lasted 43 months. Unemployment rate, like you said, went to a quarter of everyone looking for jobs. And the Consumer Price Index actually goes down. It goes into the negative. It's minus 27%. And so it really is very hard for anyone living today to wrap their head around what it was like back then. But we do know that it was way worse.
- [09:46]
Greg Jackson
We're going to always argue over the details of the causes of this absolute catastrophe. But we've got these bank failures that we talked about. Wall street, of course, crashes, Wall street had been highly unregulated. And scholars argue about the degree to which that was the main factor versus a contributing factor. Then we even have natural disasters, right? The Dust bowl, which is both, has human factors, but then the drought that strikes, right, as these farmers have, after decades, stripped so much of the plains of the vegetation that would have held the dust in place. Well, I guess I'm just going to say my heart really goes out to Herbert Hoover, the guy who was holding the bag when this all first struck. He was facing a crisis unlike anything America had ever seen. And no one really even understood entirely where this is coming from or truly how to combat it. So by the time we get to fdr, even Bert, as we know from the last few episodes, this brilliant guy, he's known as the Master of Emergencies, for crying out loud. If there's anyone who should be able to handle it, this is your go to guy. FDR wanted him as president. Both parties sought him as their nominee only years before, in my mind. And, you know, this isn't to give like a complete pass to Herbert Hoover, but it really should help us to grasp just how devastating, how thorough, how unexpected and unprecedented this moment was by the time we get to FDR coming into office in 33.
- [11:18]
Lindsay Cormack
Absolutely. And I think what we're speaking to is not only these bank failures, but when you look about the agricultural problems of the time, some of these are probably rooted in not enough government intervention. Like when we were letting animals just graze. Private cattle ranchers would have their animals grazing on public lands for free. That meant that they're eating everything up. That meant that there's a lot of room for all of these things to get whipped up into a dust bowl. We also had asked a lot of people to be moving out into the plains, giving them land for free. But oftentimes these people didn't have the requisite training to make sure they understood how to till the land, how to care for it. And so when that happens, we're over plowing, over grazing, and everything's more susceptible to erosion, which means that we're just going to exacerbate any sort of natural disaster to be worse because we haven't provided adequate assistance for people who are doing the living, the farming, the everything out there in order to make the.
- [12:06]
Greg Jackson
Country grow when FDR comes in. I personally see a fair degree. I don't want to overstate it, but I see a fair degree of continuity in that. Herbert Hoover has kind of tried a whole bunch of different things, and in comes FDR saying, we're going to keep trying all sorts of things, but he's really willing to push far further. His March 4th speech in 1933, as he's inaugurated, we tend to remember it because he says, you know, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. That's the thing that we latch onto, but the thing that everyone present. I really want to highlight this I mentioned in the episode, but it's really worth noting. The thing that people there latched onto wasn't his comment on fear, but the fact that he promised to use broad executive power. So here he is asking Congress to hand him as much executive authority as the Constitution effectively allows. And you've got the American people nodding in agreement saying, yeah, we need someone who's going to really run with the ball.
- [13:03]
Lindsay Cormack
So when we're thinking about the continuity, something that I think is interesting to mention is the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. When we think about this, it is an intervention into the economy. And this is under Hoover saying, you know what, what if we tariff goods from other countries? What if we protect our own markets? What if we make it so that farmers are going to have no competition? That's coming from outside industries. And this ends up making things a lot worse because it sort of lets it. So trade is coming into the United States, and in the four years that it's implemented, trade goes down by about 60%. And this is something that FDR comes in and does have to deal with. And it's not until 1934 when he cancels this with a reciprocal trade agreement that happens with other countries. But it's not to say that he has ideas that are entirely different than Hoover. When we look at some of the early legislation that gets passed, he's passing it above and beyond what his own Democratic Party is willing to get on board with. And instead, it's Republicans under Hoover that end up giving him the support for things like the Banking act act for things that say, like, okay, we're gonna change the way that we're doing this, and it's gonna be more restrictive when we talk about cuts to public funding or cuts to veterans or cuts to agencies. All of that happens at the very beginning of FDR's term in a way that fellow Democrats are not really thrilled about. But he's asked for a lot of power. Many of them agree with him. And Republicans come over to agree with him on those points as well.
- [14:21]
Greg Jackson
I'm gonna remind everyone of what Rex Tugwell said, one of his brain trustee gents, I'm quoting Rex we didn't admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.
- [14:35]
Lindsay Cormack
Yeah, there's definitely a continuity. And we also look to FDR when we say, like it's his first 100 days. But you're right in pointing out that, like, it's not day zero is all him. A lot of it is carried over from the past administration. And a lot of the institutional knowledge in the sitting senators and House members of the time also had that sort of influence. So they pull together a lot of different pieces of legislation. They get a lot done in those first hundred days. But that wouldn't have been true had they had someone unlike Hoover in the first place to sort of get a lot of those ideas started.
- [15:04]
Greg Jackson
Yeah. And so we get our hundred days and of course, I'll, I'll just note, right. Fifteen major pieces of legislation. We won't recount all of them again. That's, that's been done. But you just highlighted. Well, Lindsay, I mean, there are things that Republicans like, Democrats, like FDR wasn't really coming in saying. Here is this staunch liberal agenda. As much as we're going to throw everything at the wall and whatever works is what we're going to run with. So we have programs that fail that don't work the way they're intended to. I think the NEAR is actually a decent example of that. The National Recovery Administration. You can see so much American thought in this piece of legislation. I intellectually think it's just really fun to explore. Here's Franklin saying, okay, we need these industries to kind of band together, but this is America. We do not love government bringing in the heavy hand. So I'm going to have them self regulate. Right. So he sets up this thing where they're going to self regulate, but. But at the end of the day, the government still kind of has to regulate. Point being, they're just trying so many different things. And what works they run with, what fails drops by the wayside.
- [16:08]
Lindsay Cormack
In some ways, Greg, I think this might be an instance of government that doesn't suck. It's government that builds on what Congressional Democrats and Republicans need to get done. It's government that's responsive to people. It's government that makes mistakes, as anything's going to make a mistake, but it's one that's really trying to fix problems.
- [16:27]
Greg Jackson
I completely agree. And to me, the most inspiring thing about this era, about this moment, it isn't any of the specific programs that are created and happen, Republicans and Democrats alike, they're still very expressive about their concerns, the things that they disagree on. It's not like they all just sat down, rolled over and did what they were told. In fact, far to the contrary, I think the strength of this moment is that the Democrats in Congress had no problem killing a very strong president sometimes that he was wrong, that they disagreed, but a lot of the BS was really kind of set aside.
- [17:00]
Neil Maher
Yeah.
- [17:00]
Lindsay Cormack
And I think something that's really interesting, that is very contextual to this time and something that anyone alive today doesn't really remember of current politics, is that when FDR gets into the White House, he has an overwhelming majority in both the electoral vote and the popular vote. But 72% of his fellow Congress people are also Democrats, which means he could have just said, you know what? I'm only going to listen to Democrats and pass what they want to do. But that's not what happens. Instead, we get a number of pieces of legislation that are passed unanimously, and we get a number of pieces of legislation that are passed with Republicans supporting it as well as Democrats. So instead of just playing partisan politics, I'm going to get everything done that my party wants. He really does reach across the aisle, or the members in Congress do that reaching. And when it comes to him, he's willing to take suggestions from both Republican sides of the aisle and Democratic sides of the aisle. And this really helps him, I think, because in the four terms that he's elected to, he continues to have pretty big majorities in Congress. It's. It gets lower and lower over time. But when he exits, when he dies, there's 60% are still held by Democrats within Congress. So it speaks to sort of his ability to show the nation what it is to do something that works and then have those people be rewarded with votes come the next election.
- [18:10]
Greg Jackson
Yeah, I think it's interesting to see how fdr, I mean, he has moments where he definitely does things that the public doesn't love. I mean, we won't recount the entire last episode, but his attempt to pack the court, or however you want to phrase that, it doesn't play well. And yet I see an American public that is frankly, more forgiving and understanding of the government, more trusting. That's the word I'm really reaching for. Right. Perfection is a fairy tale that doesn't happen. But being able to stumble forward and take on big, bold things, that is what America saw in fdr.
- [18:46]
Lindsay Cormack
They're able to see more than many others could have because he starts this fireside chat tradition. He says, let me tell you exactly what it is that I'm doing understanding full well that you're not all going to like every piece of it. But when he starts that sort of conversation with America, I think that opens up a different way that the public can trust the President, the public can trust government. And we sort of see this in his effectiveness because just two weeks after he starts like his first Fireside Chat, we get the Reforestation relief Ask that pact and that's where we get the Civilian Conservation Corps. So he sort of understands this two way street of like I'm going to tell them what I'm doing, I'm going to try what I'm doing and hopefully it works out right.
- [19:25]
Greg Jackson
Let me just say in closing out before I yield the floor, shall we say to you and Professor Maher. This is such a dark moment in American history. The, the Great Depression and yet it is transformative. And the leadership, it's a far cry from perfect because there's no such thing as perfection. But it is inspiring to, to see these figures that could win the trust of the majority of the American people and figure out the way forward. So with that I'm gonna hand the rest of this over to you. And thanks again for joining me and for carrying on this chat about the ccc. I've been counted out, dismissed, passed over, told I'd never be a golfer with just one arm. But the only thing that feels better than proving people wrong is out driving them. I'm 14 year old golfer Tommy Morrissey and I want to be remembered for my abilities as a champion partner of the Masters.
- [20:23]
Neil Maher
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Lindsay Cormack
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Neil Maher
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Lindsay Cormack
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- [20:39]
Greg Jackson
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Lindsay Cormack
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Greg Jackson
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Greg Jackson
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Neil Maher
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Lindsay Cormack
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- [21:47]
Neil Maher
I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [21:49]
Lindsay Cormack
Before we get into the Civilian Conservation Corps, I noticed something that is, I think our lives have this parallel but reverse setup. Where you started life in New York, I started life in Kansas. Then you went over to the University of Kansas, I came over to nyu. Then you have the Hudson Valley and part of your history. I also summer and live in the Hudson Valley when I'm not in the city. And then we both are working in New Jersey.
- [22:12]
Neil Maher
It's a little scary.
- [22:13]
Lindsay Cormack
There's a lot of overlap. Will you tell me what was your impression when you got to Kansas?
- [22:19]
Neil Maher
Well, I went out there to work with an environmental historian, Donald Wurster, who is sort of one of the founders in the field, and he just welcomed me, and his students welcomed me. So for me, it was just an incredible experience. I had never been in the Great Plains before. I ended up writing about the Great Plains while I was out there. And part of this book is about the Great Plains.
- [22:41]
Lindsay Cormack
Okay. I wanted to get into the book that you wrote, Nature's New the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. I learned a ton about this because I didn't realize that conservation had very different meanings back then. It seems like there's, like, two schools of thought for conservation. Is that correct?
- [22:59]
Neil Maher
There were two ideas about, you know, conservation versus this thing called preservation. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. And that's sort of the narrative in the field, is that back at the turn of the century, you had these conservationists like Gifford Pinchot, who was the governor of Pennsylvania, a very good friend of Teddy Roosevelt's and Franklin Roosevelt and a good friend of John Muir, and he sort of felt that we were using our natural resources irresponsibly and unwisely. And he was the first American trained as a forester, a professional forester, went to Europe and learned about forestry. And he came back and promoted this notion that we had to use our resources wisely.
- [23:38]
Lindsay Cormack
So it's like a judicious use of the resources, which is different than don't touch them at all.
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Neil Maher
It's very much. Not that it's very much. Let's use them and conserve them wisely so we can keep using them and keep using them for economic production. And then you had other people like John Muir. He was a naturalist and a hiker and camper way out in the Sierras in California who had that preservationist idea. He thought we shouldn't be touching nature, we should be leaving it alone, because it represented both a physical rejuvenation but also a spiritual bond as well. So he felt we should preserve it. And what happened is Pinchot and Muir were friends and working together. And then the controversy over building a dam at Hetchi in Yosemite national park divides them. And John Muir argues we should preserve it. Gifford Pinchot argues we should build the dam to conserve the resources, which is in that case, is water. And it divides the movement into these two ideas of conservation, Wise use versus preservation.
- [24:40]
Lindsay Cormack
Don't touch and the dam gets built.
- [24:42]
Neil Maher
The dam gets built. It breaks John Muir's heart. He dies a couple months later. And we see that division really very much in government programs like the US Forest Service, which is about conserving timber, versus the National Park Service, which is about preserving land so we can recreate in it. So the two ideas continue on in.
- [25:01]
Lindsay Cormack
Our government structure in that through thread. Yeah. So History that doesn't suck has just completed four episodes chronicling the New Deal, which, of course, is the federal government's response to the grave economic and environmental crises facing the Nation in the 1930s. In your excellent book, you write that the CCC was a key early initiative that rallied support for the Roosevelt administration's proactive interventions through the New Deal. I want us to talk about that. Was it about congressional support or public support or what made that something that was possible to get done in that moment?
- [25:33]
Neil Maher
I think when you talk about the CCC's popularity, it's both so on the popular sort of public imagination. It was a really good story. The story of this program. Let's take these young boys who have been hurt by the Great Depression. Economically, they're unemployed, they're unhealthy, they're standing around on street corners. Let's take those young men and put them to work conserving our nature, our natural resources, you know, making American natural resources more usable.
- [26:02]
Lindsay Cormack
Was there not a concern from the public that, like, having these young boys in their towns might like, absolutely rile up the ladies or do something that it's unseemly for the Rest of the town?
- [26:12]
Neil Maher
Absolutely. At first, all these local communities were really upset because they thought, incorrectly, that most of these young men were coming from cities. And it turns out it was 50, 50 city boys and rural boys. But the locals were very concerned about these young men who were in camps outside the cities, in a state forest or a national forest or a park. But they would come into town on the weekends, and the young men would go to dance halls and theaters for watch films and bars to shoot pool. And they were worried that these young men would, you know, date their daughters and cause havoc.
- [26:49]
Lindsay Cormack
But I imagine they're also spending money, and so local communities are probably okay with that.
- [26:52]
Neil Maher
That is exactly how these local communities overcame their wariness of these camps and these young men. The young men were making a dollar a day, $30 a month, 25 of that went home to their families, but they got to keep $5 and they spent that money in town. But more importantly, each camp spent about $5,000 every month locally on goods and services. So the food that these young boys ate, they bought that food locally. The coal that was used to heat the barracks in the winter, they bought that locally. So basically, these CCC camps were like an ATM machine for these local economies.
- [27:31]
Lindsay Cormack
A government funded ATM machine?
- [27:33]
Neil Maher
Correct.
- [27:33]
Lindsay Cormack
Distributed throughout the United States.
- [27:35]
Neil Maher
Correct.
- [27:36]
Lindsay Cormack
Every state and territory has some element.
- [27:38]
Neil Maher
There were 1400 camps usually in existence at one time. That's $5,000 month at each camp, or about $60,000 a year pouring into these local economies from through the federal government. And that's what changed people's opinion about having a camp nearby.
- [27:53]
Lindsay Cormack
Okay, so public opinion turns and says, yes, happy to have them. What about congressional perspectives on this?
- [27:59]
Neil Maher
Great question. So at first, there was opposition to the ccc, both on the left and the right. So the left was worried that the military who ran the camps was going to militarize youth. And this was a concern because at the time, Hitler was on the rise in Germany and he had a CCC like program. So people were very concerned on the left that this CCC was going to, you know, turn these young boys into, you know, fascists. On the right, you had people like Father Charles Coughlin, who felt that this could radicalize the young boys and make them communists because this was a government program, a federal program. So what Roosevelt did was he was very, very savvy about it. He only had the military take care of the young men when they were in the camp. So when they went out to work, the military wasn't involved. And then he also used the camps to both reward and hurt his political opponents. So he wielded the camps as a political tool. So he decided where the camps were located. He was very.
- [29:04]
Lindsay Cormack
He himself.
- [29:05]
Neil Maher
He himself. He wrote on his original sketch of how the Corps was going to be organized. He said, I want to determine personally where these camps are located. And he did that because he could punish his opponents, who were against the New Deal by removing camps from their districts or not locating camps in their districts. And he could reward his allies by funneling more camps into their districts, which would bring more federal dollars to their constituents. So he was very savvy about how he used the CCC to garner congressional support.
- [29:37]
Lindsay Cormack
Okay, and I have another question on that. When we think about the boys and the men who are staffing this, Would everyone serve in their own state, or would they get shipped to other states? And is that ideologically part of.
- [29:48]
Neil Maher
Was less politically ideologically a part of it. But it was conscious because they were worried that if they stationed the young men, the boys, if they stationed them near home, that they would get homesick and, as they called it, go over the hill, which would mean just walk out of camp and go home. So they consciously sent them to a nearby military base to get physically fit, and then they sent them on a train, often halfway across the country, so that they could not go over the hill and walk home.
- [30:15]
Lindsay Cormack
I imagine that builds some set of character.
- [30:17]
Neil Maher
Yeah. Many of the men, I did about a dozen interviews for this with former CCC enrollees and. And they kept equating it to what they imagined it would have been like to go away to college. So they're away from their families for the first time. They're having to be responsible for their own, you know, life. They're meeting other people their age, and they felt that it was an incredibly formative experience for them. And they also got to see the country. They're traveling on trains, young boys from Jersey City traveling on trains out west and seeing, you know, the Sierra Nevada mountains or the Great Plains. Right. They felt very proud about it.
- [30:52]
Lindsay Cormack
I imagine they're also developmentally putting on muscle because they're, like, very physically taxed in the things that they're doing.
- [31:00]
Neil Maher
Absolutely. And that was part of the CCC's plan and also part of the way the CCC branded itself. So it showed how these young men came in, and they were, like, scrawny and unhealthy and underweight. And they knew this from physical examinations they did of these young boys. And then they left the CCC having gained weight because they Ate enormous amounts of food in the program. They were muscled because they did all this outdoor work in the program. It was very little machinery. It was all manual labor. And the corps promoted this. There are images and photographs of the young men with their shirts off, sort of getting tanned in the sun, outdoor in nature, doing this manual labor. And this notion that they were, in a sense, conserving these young men.
- [31:45]
Lindsay Cormack
Oh, in addition to, like, the conservation efforts of the landscape, it's. It's the human power.
- [31:50]
Neil Maher
They began to call it the conservation of human resources, not just the conservation of soil, timber and water, but they were conserving America's youth. And it was a very good and savvy branding exercise of the federal government.
- [32:06]
Lindsay Cormack
So let's talk about that physical labor. The CCC was nicknamed Roosevelt's Tree army, but its work was much broader than planting trees. Can you tell us more about the broader scope of the CCC project?
- [32:18]
Neil Maher
Another great question. When I first started the book, I thought, oh, I'm just going to be looking at tree planting for the next, you know, for 10 years of the Great Depression. And they did do a lot of tree planting. Two billion trees, half the trees planted in U.S. history up to that point. Twelve trees for every Depression era American, which is why it's called Roosevelt's Tree Army. But what happens in 1934 is there's a dust bowl in the Great Plains. And Franklin Roosevelt becomes aware of that because he's at his Hyde park estate and it's snowing red snow in Hyde park, because the soil from the Great Plains has been lifted up into the atmosphere, carried all the way over to the east coast, and is coming down as red snow. And he uses that to call for an expansion of the CCC. It increases from 250,000 young men to over 500,000 young men. And then he signs almost all those new men and camps to the Great Plains area to start tackling soil erosion in the Great Plains. And they conserve over 40 million acres of agricultural land out there. It's incredible. But then in the late 30s, it shifts again. At this point, Americans have been through almost a decade of economic deprivation. They're beaten down, they're degraded. A lot of them are not nourished and unhealthy. So Roosevelt begins to think, well, if we're conserving those young men in the CCC through their physical work, if we start building recreation areas where ordinary Americans can go for cheap, then they could become healthy too. So they begin to invest and assign all these camps to parks, state parks, county parks and national parks. And the Corps begins to develop hiking trails, campgrounds, picnic areas, even roads so that people can get to these parks easily and recreate. And they promote this as sort of the conservation of the American people through outdoor recreation.
- [34:14]
Lindsay Cormack
So this question will betray, like, how little I know as someone who was in Kansas, not going to national or state parks as recreation. But I do know now that I'm on the east coast and I go through some of these, or even when I've traveled to the west coast, they have, like, a particular look. And someone told me it was called parkitecture. Is parkitecture what happens in this time, or is that something that happens later?
- [34:35]
Neil Maher
Well, there's also parkitecture from the 60s that is less. I think, what you're talking about.
- [34:40]
Lindsay Cormack
Okay, so this would. So the stuff that you would see in a national park today that the CCC laid would be what?
- [34:46]
Neil Maher
So what the CCC did was it had professionals that directed the young men in their work. So if they were doing a forestry job, they would have professional foresters who would help the young men learn how to plant trees, for instance, or a soil agronomist, if they were doing agricultural work. But in parks, they had landscape architects and landscape designers and architects. And what they did was the goal was, whenever possible, to use local materials to build any of the structures that they were building. So if they were in the desert Southwest, they would use local stone to build a visitor center. If they were in New England, they would use different stone or local wood to build the structures. And the goal, the idea was that those structures would then blend in with the environment. They would be an extension of that geographic place. It was an aesthetic that was very unique in public spaces at the time and incredibly popular even today. When people go to these places, they see this. You mentioned it yourself. You see that structure, that architecture, and you know it. You feel it's old. You know it's done at a different time, but you also know it was done at a certain period for a certain reason, and it was thoughtful and.
- [35:59]
Lindsay Cormack
Conscious, you know, so you mentioned this earlier. You said there was 250,000 young men in the first few months. But it seems that ultimately 3 million young men are in this program. Beyond addressing high unemployment and getting those boys back to work, what were some of the other benefits of the CCC, in particular to this generation of men?
- [36:19]
Neil Maher
So you mentioned the economics. So the economics helped both these young boys, but also their families, and it helped the communities as well. We've also talked about the Physical benefits that these young men got right from eating so much and working so hard and, you know, laboring outdoors. But there was also sort of vocational benefits as well. The young men would work all day, and then they would come home and they'd have dinner, and then they would have after work classes that they could take. So every camp in the country had an education program, and there were multiple classes they could take. Some of them were vocational. They could learn car mechanics or type, how to type, typewriting, or even many of them learned how to read. But then there were also more professional classes as well. So a lot of them became foresters or agronomists, soil scientists or even landscape designers from national parks. And many of them even took college classes through the Corps at local colleges. They were allowed to go to those schools and take classes as well. So there was an educational component also.
- [37:20]
Lindsay Cormack
And then I imagine in some way, as the CCC winds down the US like entrance into World War II is sort of ramping up. Is there a transfer of the skills that they develop as a part of the corps into that 100%?
- [37:32]
Neil Maher
Because gotta remember, those camps were run and administered by the military. So, you know, while the young men were in those camps, they got accustomed to how the military functioned, how seniority had to be listened to, how they had to function in a certain way. And it was a very easy transition for them to then move into the military. And I read in my research somewhere, I think it's true that over 80% of of CCC enrollees went into the military for World War II. That's a huge number of young men. I think that they did that because they were accustomed to what it was like to be in the military, but also because they were able to quickly move up in the military because they had that experience. And, you know, remember, these were a lot of working class young men who didn't have a lot of other options. And the military was a great way for them to move up.
- [38:24]
Lindsay Cormack
So you've said that the military ran the bases at this time. Is this still the Department of War?
- [38:28]
Neil Maher
It is the Department of War.
- [38:30]
Lindsay Cormack
And then there's the Department of Interior and Department of Agriculture. Is there anyone else who has a hand in this?
- [38:34]
Neil Maher
The Bureau of Indian affairs runs the Native American program, which was a separate program. And I would add separate and unequal. And then there was the Department of Labor, who recruited the young men and got them to the military bases. And there were other programs. The Soil Conservation Service was quite involved, but that was from within the Department of Agriculture. So the Departments of Agriculture and Interior administered the young men once they left the camps and did their work out in the field. And then when they came back to the camps, the military took over again.
- [39:05]
Lindsay Cormack
Okay, so we've been talking about young men who did this, but it couldn't just be any young man who signed up. Can you tell us what the requirements were for entering this?
- [39:13]
Neil Maher
Sure. You have to be a man. First of all, there was one women's camp in the nation. Eleanor Roosevelt lobbied Franklin for months to allow women to join the ccc and he would not allow it because he wanted to protect the male breadwinner's role within these families. There was a female CCC like program that stationed women at colleges and other types of campuses throughout the country. But I could only find evidence of one camp, and that was in Bear Mountain State park, not too far from Hyde park, where Eleanor and Franklin lived.
- [39:45]
Lindsay Cormack
And while we're on that, they weren't doing the clearing and the cutting. They were learning other skills.
- [39:49]
Neil Maher
Correct. They wouldn't let them do the conservation work. They were learning domestic skills like how to clean a house or cook or take care of their children. Right.
- [39:58]
Lindsay Cormack
Okay. But let's go back to the men, the boys who get into it because they couldn't just sign up. They had to qualify in some ways.
- [40:03]
Neil Maher
Yeah, yeah, you're totally right. They have to be unemployed. They have to be between the ages of 18 and 25 because they didn't want the young men competing with male breadwinners. They had to be from families who were on state relief roles. So usually their parents, their fathers, had to be unemployed as well. And they could sign up for six month blocks and then keep signing up for up to two years.
- [40:24]
Lindsay Cormack
And if we say state relief roles, the modern analog would be like a welfare role. Okay. And so your family must be on this for you to be eligible to be like unemployment.
- [40:33]
Neil Maher
Right. Okay.
- [40:34]
Greg Jackson
Okay.
- [40:34]
Lindsay Cormack
And so we've, we've talked about how men and women didn't share camps. There's only one women's camp. You were describing earlier about how there was a separate sort of program for Native Americans. What about black Americans in this time period?
- [40:45]
Neil Maher
Sure. I just want to mention that that separate program for Native Americans, they didn't have camps for them as Native Americans lived on their reservations and then went every day back and forth to the projects.
- [40:54]
Lindsay Cormack
Were they paid the same?
- [40:56]
Neil Maher
I believe they were paid the same. Yes. African Americans in the early years were in the same camps as white enrollees, usually in a separate barrack. But they were in the same camps. As the program developed, they began to create segregated camps. So there were African American camps and there were camps of white enrollees. Importantly, in the African American camps, the administrators in those camps were predominantly white. And it was very difficult for those African American enrollees to move up administratively in those camps.
- [41:26]
Lindsay Cormack
Were the performances or the duties that were tasked to white camps the same as they were to black camps, just in different areas, or did they have different roles?
- [41:34]
Neil Maher
It seemed that way to me. I didn't really examine that enough. But interestingly, you would think that in the south, the local communities would be much more alarmed at having an African American camp nearby. And it turned out that wasn't the case. More communities in the north who had African American camps nearby, they were the ones who got most upset by that. I think it might be because people in the south were more familiar with African American people living around them. So maybe they weren't as alarmed by that. But it was interesting to find out that in the north is where most of the animosity or criticism towards those camps arose.
- [42:08]
Lindsay Cormack
Yeah, that familiarity story makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Will you tell us then, picking any sort of camp that you want or maybe an amalgamation in your head, what would a day in the life of a person who's at this camp look like?
- [42:18]
Neil Maher
The Corps described it over and over again so much to the American public. So it began at 6am with Reveille. A bugle would usually sound or a recording of a bugle. The boys would get up, they would make their beds, they would clean their barracks, they would get dressed and they would go to breakfast. A huge, enormous breakfast in the mess hall. They would then pile into trucks and be transported 5, 10 miles to the work site, if it was in a national forest or a state forest. They would then be transferred over to the Department of Interior, where foresters would oversee their work for the day. If it was on farmland, a Department of Agriculture person would take them, or in a park, a National Park Service official who live with the boys but travel with them to the site. Lunch would usually be brought out to their site. They would eat lunch in the field, and then at around 4:30, they would come back to camp. They would have dinner at 5:30, and then after, they would be free to either go to the recreation hall, the library. Each camp had a recreation hall and a library. They had sports fields, usually a baseball field. They had boxing rings. They played sports against each other, but also against local towns, or they could go take these incredible classes that this whole education system the Department of Education ran in each of the camps and then also two or three times a week they would get in trucks again and go into town in the evenings to local cinemas or bars or dance halls and pass the time that way as well.
- [43:41]
Lindsay Cormack
So what you described sounds like an eight hour workday. Or is it? And are they doing it every day of the week? Five days a week?
- [43:48]
Neil Maher
Five days a week. And they had the weekends off to do what they wanted to do. Go into town, take some more classes or just relax in the the library or the rec hall.
- [44:01]
Lindsay Cormack
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Neil Maher
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Lindsay Cormack
Does that sound crazy? And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous. Okay, that's it.
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Greg Jackson
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Neil Maher
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Lindsay Cormack
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Neil Maher
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Lindsay Cormack
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Neil Maher
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- [45:41]
Lindsay Cormack
Can you tell us about a park or a forest or a piece of infrastructure that was created by the CCC that you find specifically interesting?
- [45:48]
Neil Maher
There are two. The first is something very, very well known, the Red Rocks Amphitheater outside of Denver, Colorado. It's just one of the most incredible places, an amphitheater that holds 10,000 people. But it's set into this incredible red rock natural amphitheater and the seating and the whole stage structure just blends in perfectly with these red rock monoliths that sort of surround the amphitheater. It's just absolutely stunning and is very, very well known. But I also like to think that the little places are also important. So I live in the Hudson Valley, and I grew up in this town, and I'm a runner. I've been running for 30 years in these woods near my town. And I'm running on these trails, and I'm running down these little stone steps, and I'm running by these rock sort of outcroppings that seem to have sort of benches built in them. And I'm like, this is just too familiar. And this. I started thinking about this much more after I wrote the book. So I went and did some research, and it turns out there was a CCC camp about five miles north of my hometown. And one of their jobs was to build these trails through what then was a county park that I'm now running through, like, every day of my life. So I'm running right alongside these incredible stone structures that young men almost 100 years ago built in my town.
- [47:07]
Lindsay Cormack
So I imagine you've gone to many more national, state, and county parks than I have. But when I go there, there's not an overwhelming indication that it was all built by the cc. Why do you think that is?
- [47:17]
Neil Maher
I think that part of the reason is that so much of it was built by the CCC. I mean, the CCC created 800 state parks from the ground up. Okay, that's a lot. And they built the infrastructure in those parks. Every national park in the country has CCC infrastructure. Almost every visitor center you know, of the big national parks has been constructed by the ccc. Basically, if you've been in a state or national park in this country, you have walked on CCC trails, you have slept under the stars in a CCC campground. You have bought a trinket as a souvenir in a CCC visitor center.
- [47:53]
Lindsay Cormack
There's no doubt One of the CCC's goals was to foster citizenship and a sense of public service among its enrollees. How successful would you say it was in achieving this, and how do you think it shaped the enrollees views of government and community?
- [48:06]
Neil Maher
This issue of citizenship is really important for the CCC because in the beginning, there were people from both the left and the right who opposed the CCC around this issue. So on the left, you had people who were worried that the military, the Department of War, was going to militarize these young boys in the camps and they would foster fascism. And then on the right, you had people who felt that this was a sort of a communist program. So Roosevelt was very savvy, and he said and promoted the CCC as having what he called and what the CCC called, called an Americanizing influence on these young men. They called the CCC a civic melting pot. And what they promoted was that the core would take all these young boys, these hyphenated Americans, Irish American, Polish American, Italian American young men, take them into the corps, feed them, have them working in American nature out there in Yosemite national park with redwood trees and in the mountains of the Rockies. And through that labor, it would transform these hyphenated American boys into full blooded American men. And there is iconography in the imagery of the ccc. There are press releases that promote this. Now, you know, whether it was successful or not, one might, you know, argue, but in the public imagination, this is what was being promoted. And many of the young men sort of felt this way.
- [49:25]
Lindsay Cormack
And if we think about it as sort of the ritual or symbolism of it, I imagine they're raising the flag every morning and they're taking it down the evening.
- [49:32]
Neil Maher
Absolutely. If the COVID of my book, there's a woodcut, the CCC had an artist project within it as well. And there's a woodcut of these two young men in the ccc enrollees with their shirts off, right? Showing their big muscles, right? And they're planting a tree. And behind them in the sky is this giant American flag, right? So that symbol right there of that one piece of art brings it all together. They're being conserved as human resources. The tree that they're planting is a natural resource. And then that political backdrop behind them, big American flag, right?
- [50:05]
Lindsay Cormack
Yeah. Flags in every state, flags in every camp.
- [50:07]
Neil Maher
Every camp had a flag. They raised it and lowered it every day.
- [50:10]
Lindsay Cormack
Thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been really informative.
- [50:14]
Neil Maher
Thank you. It's been great to be here.
- [50:17]
Greg Jackson
Well, my friends, that wraps up this epilogue episode. I'll see you back here. For upcoming stories about the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, and other enduring engineering achievements from the 1930s. And don't forget that right now you can listen to an extra short story, narrated by me, about a day in the life of one of the first Civilian Conservation Corps camps. You can access this and more by visiting hgdspodcast.com membership or click the link in the episode notes to start a free seven day trial. History that Doesn't Suck is created and hosted by me, Greg Jackson. Episode produced by by Dawson McCraw with editorial assistance by Ella Hendrickson. Production by Airshift Sound design by Molly Bach Theme music composed by Greg Jackson arrangement and additional composition by Lindsey Graham of AirShip. For a bibliography of all primary and secondary sources consulted and writing this episode, visit htdspodcast.com HTDS is supported by fans at HTDS podcast my gratitude to you kind souls providing funding to help us keep going. Thank you and a special thanks to our patrons whose monthly gift puts them at producer status. Ahmad Chapman, Andy Thompson, Art Lane, Bob Stinnett, Brad Davidson, Bronwyn Cohen, Bruce Hibbert, Carissa Sedlak, Charlie Mages, Chloe Tripp, Christopher Merchant, Christopher Pullman, Dan G. David Rifkin, Durante Spencer, Donald Moore, Ellen Stewart, Elizabeth Christiansen, otiviado, Ernie Lomaster G2303 George J. Sherwood, Henry Brunges, Polly Hamilton, Jake Gilbreth, James Bledsoe, Janie McCreary, Jeff Marx, Jessica Poppen, Joe Dobas, John Booby, John Frugal, Dougal John Oliveros, John Rudlevich, John Schaefer, Jonathan Turrell, Jordan Corbett, Joshua Steiner, Justin M. Spriggs, Justin May K. Kim R. Kim Reniger, Kristen Pratt, Kyle Decker, El Paul Goeringer, Lawrence Neubauer, Linda Cunningham, Matt Siegel, Melanie Jan Nake Seconder, Nick Caffrell, Noah Hoff, Owen W. Sedlak, Reese Humphries, Wadsworth, Rick Brown, Robert Drazovich, Sarah Trawick, Sharon Thiessen, Sean Baines, Stacy Ritter, Steven Williams, the Creepy Girl, Thomas Sabbath, Zach Green and Zack Jackson Join me in two weeks I'd like to tell you a story.