Help for the Common Man

The CCC.

Founded on 31 March 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of President Roosevelt's first New Deal programs. During its nine-year existence the CCC employed more than 2.5 million young men in temporary camps administered by the U.S. Army. In 1935, at the high point of its activity, the CCC employed half a million men in twenty-five hundred camps nationwide. For about a dollar a day the young members of "Roosevelt's Tree Army" restored historic sites, built park facilities, cleaned reservoirs, fought forest fires, and planted more than two billion trees. The CCC also taught thirty-five thousand illiterate young men to read. Though considered one of the most successful programs created during Roosevelt's first hundred days in office, the CCC was not without its flaws. Women were excluded from its membership rolls; and, though more than two hundred thousand African Americans did serve in the CCC, the...

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