Civilian Conservation Corps

In March 1933, within weeks of his inauguration, President Franklin Roosevelt sent legislation to Congress aimed at providing relief for one out of every four American workers who were unemployed.  He proposed a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to provide jobs in natural resource conservation.  Over the next decade, the CCC put more than three million youn men to work in the nations forest, parks, and farms: planting trees, creating flood barriers, fighting fires, and building roads and trails,  Corps workers lived in camps under quasi-military discipline and received a wage of $30 per month, $25 of which they were required to send home to their families.  This AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film interweaves rich archival imagery with the personal accounts of CCC veterans to tell the stoyr of one of the boldest and most popular New Deal experiments, positioning it as a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern environmentalism and national service.

 

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