For roughly a decade, the Civilian Conservation Corps put millions of young men to work tending to America’s natural resources.
In the early days of the CCC, the program was a vital lifeline for its participants and their families. Towards the end, as the economic crisis became less dire, it served as a de facto vocational training program. Those who participated learned remunerative trades, took classes, and in some cases, gained basic literacy skills.
This isn’t to say that the CCC was simply a make-work program. Participation represented legitimate national service. Enlistees replenished America’s forests, introduced the best available soil management practices, developed parks, and made additions to military bases.
Background and Motivations
“Barely a day went by when Franklin didn’t talk about his love of birds,” writes Douglas Brinkley in Rightful Heritage, a history of FDR’s role in the conservation movement.
Growing up in the rustic and secluded Hyde park, the young Roosevelt spent virtually all of his free time outdoors, studying, shooting, and collecting birds. Before he entered Groton at 14, Roosevelt had become “a local authority on birds,” taking copious notes of his own observations and even contributing several specimens to a nearby natural history museum.
This interest in nature would persist throughout his life. After his father’s death, Roosevelt would learn enough about soil management to effectively steward his family’s farmland. During his post-college tour of Europe, he came to admire German forestry practices, going so far as to try and replicate them once he returned to New York.
His studies in land use informed not only how he managed his own affairs but also his approach to public policy. He took a particular interest in public parks. On the campaign trail, he would sometimes use his knowledge of agriculture to connect with farmers. As a state senator, his first assignment was to chair the Forest, Fish, and Game committee.
As governor of New York, Roosevelt, along with his Conservation Commissioner Henry Morgenthau, developed a program wherein impoverished youth in the cities would be given the opportunity to work on farms. The two would later lead an effort to have the state buy exhausted farmland for the purposes of reforestation. The legislative provision that appropriated funding for this project was known as the Hewitt Amendment. Brinkley writes, “Whether or not the Hewitt Amendment was the birth of New Deal conservationism, the New York Times interpreted it as the start of FDR’s 1932 campaign for the presidency.”
Roosevelt’s first inaugural address supports the notion that natural resource management was central to his vision for his presidency. Today, most people only remember one line from Roosevelt’s speech. Those with slightly more familiarity with the text read it as an argument for expanding executive power during times of crisis. However, a deeper reading points to a much more specific call to action.
“Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.”
Roosevelt’s personal fascination with nature is the key to understanding the origins of the Civilian Conservation Corps. In weighing the relative importance of Roosevelt’s stated goals - to create work for the unemployed and to wisely steward America’s natural resources - people tend to see the former goal as primary and the latter one as incidental.
Roosevelt’s personal history and pre-presidential policy record cast serious doubt on this assumption. And if Roosevelt’s passion for conservationism inspired the CCC as an idea, it would also inform the shape the organization would take in practice.
Organizational Structure
Just days after taking office, Roosevelt held a dinner with several cabinet secretaries and other officials to discuss his plans for his natural resource agenda. According to a report by CCC Director J.J. McEntee:
“The first official CCC meeting had moved rapidly because the president had been thinking and planning about this project for months. He, as a matter of fact, had been concerned about conservation for many years…. At the conclusion of the discussion, the President asked the Secretary of War if the plan for a national CCC, as he had outlined it, could be put into effect at once. The answer was ‘yes.’”
While Roosevelt is sometimes (justly) accused of having created an “alphabet soup” of agencies with overlapping functions, the Civilian Conservation Corps was organized so as to leverage existing sources of state capacity. Among those who gathered at Roosevelt’s dinner, in addition to the President and the Secretary of War, were the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior. Roosevelt assembled this group because he intended to use the capabilities of all of their departments. According to the McEntee report:
“The new organization set up to run the CCC was unique in governmental administration. It was unique because not one but several agencies participated in its operations and administration. The president had arranged to utilize the personnel and services of old line departments, thus ensuring sound administration from the start and avoiding the expenditure of large sums for the building up of a new supply unit and large administrative staffs.”
The War Department would help with training and logistics, and by assigning army officers to serve as the cadre of the early camps. The Departments of Interior and Agriculture would recommend projects and help select sites for the camps. The Labor Department would be responsible for recruiting participants. Dedicated administrative roles within the CCC would be few and would exist mainly for coordination purposes. The new program would not spawn a large, slow-moving bureaucracy.
When the time came to select a director for CCC, Roosevelt chose a union leader named Robert Fechner, mainly to appease congressional liberals who feared that the CCC would distort the labor market to the detriment of workers. According to Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment, Roosevelt intended for Fechner to serve as a figurehead while the White House maintained significant control over the program.
Beyond the fiscal advantages of this top-light approach to administration, it also made the organization more nimble. To borrow a phrase from Alter, Roosevelt often made “flexible midcourse adjustments” to the program, such as raising the age ceiling to pacify members of the Bonus Army who were desperate for work.
Indeed, the CCC went through a number of iterations. An early emphasis on hand labor gave way to the use of more sophisticated tools. Civilian cadre took over from the military officers who originally ran the camps. More training and educational opportunities were made available to enlistees over time. The size of the corps expanded and contracted according to the program’s popularity and the country’s needs.
This iterative tendency was due in part to the CCC’s relatively flat organizational structure and the White House’s direct role in guiding the organization. In large, established organizations, new ideas emerge endogenously and must flow through narrow official channels to take effect. As a result, change happens slowly. However, when a small number of decision-makers are able to impose changes from the top down on the strength of political will, things can move much more quickly.
The CCC’s organizational structure lent itself to direct intervention by the executive, rapid iteration in response to experimentation and changing conditions, and close coordination with other parts of government. While it would be harder today to imbue government programs with these qualities, they are worth keeping in mind as design goals.
Ephemerality as a Feature
The CCC was founded as an emergency program, and as such, it was only authorized to operate for a limited period of time. Due to the program’s early successes, Congress extended this authorization multiple times and even overruled FDR’s own attempts to downsize the organization ahead of his reelection campaign in 1936.
Many analyses of the CCC suggest that the program’s inherent impermanence prevented it from engaging in long-term planning and taking on more ambitious projects. There’s something to this, but there are upsides to impermanence as well. Because the CCC was never guaranteed another extension, it had to regularly prove its value. Because it only existed for nine years, it never had the chance to ossify, develop a permanent bureaucracy, or stray too far from its mission.
Whether or not one approves of the New Deal’s role in expanding the size and scope of government, the New Deal was characterized by the sort of dynamism in government that hadn’t been seen since the founding, and has never been seen again. On a recent episode of Michael Anton’s podcast, The Stakes, the controversial blogger Curtis Yarvin made an interesting point:
“When I talk about the New Deal to people in Silicon Valley, I’m like, the New Deal was a startup government… You had this total startup experience, where you had this thing that was full of vitality, full of energy, could turn on a dime, could create and destroy agencies like no one’s business, and had this incredible mission of bringing America up to European standards in the 1930’s.”
The initial success of government programs often leads to dysfunction later as successful efforts are institutionalized and granted permanent mandates. For a long time to come, NASA will be able to rest on Apollo's laurels, but is it really the same agency that sent a man to the moon?
It’s possible that the wider scope of the modern federal government, itself the product of New Deal era successes, makes the sort of hands-on executive control that Roosevelt was able to exercise difficult to replicate. In the early days of the CCC, Roosevelt’s staff were unable to run the program as directly as Roosevelt had initially planned. This level of involvement in federal programs on the part of the White House would be even harder to manage today.
In 1984, Newt Gingrich appeared on an episode of Firing Line to discuss the future of the Republican Party. In defending his then-surprisingly moderate views on the role of government, he introduced an important distinction between bold government action in support of national priorities and permanent shifts towards greater centralization, saying:
“In the 19th century, when I think we were successful in the use of government, we tended towards government shaping very big projects… but it didn’t say ‘and now we’re going to have a central government that will apportion out and try to manage, as we now do’…. Washington now makes microdecisions at levels that are insane. You can’t possibly govern a nation of this size, as tightly as we try to, through a bureaucratic system in Washington.”
In Gingrich’s thinking, government action works best when it addresses discrete problems and goals, and when it’s time-limited. These qualities are rarely seen in practice, but there may be things that can be done to imbue government programs with them.
Some state and federal legislation is subject to sunset provisions, where the legislation automatically expires after a certain point unless it’s renewed. A particularly radical version of this concept can be found in the state of Texas, where most states agencies are subject to review every 12 years and can theoretically be abolished.
While seemingly antithetical to the spirit of the New Deal, such measures might serve to renew the sort of dynamism that made the best of the New Deal programs possible. Historical contingency may have pruned the state in the past, but it can’t be relied upon to do the same now.
Conclusion
There are interesting debates to be had about the proper role of government. What’s less debatable is that government should be effective at what it does set out to do.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was more functional than any comparable program would be today. Different times call for different types of government action, and we shouldn’t seek to recreate the CCC in every particular. However, in pursuing our own national priorities, we should take inspiration from the CCC’s economical use of existing government resources, nimble organizational structure, direct accountability to the executive, and conditional mandate.
Government doesn’t have to be as dysfunctional as it tends to be today. Other models have been tried and should be reverse-engineered. The CCC represents just one such model.
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