The Civilian Conservation Corps, known as the CCC, was one of the programs started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It created new jobs for young American men to work on drought and wildfire relief, soil erosion, and state parks and public outdoor spaces. CCC members worked long days and lived in barracks at camps.
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A Trunk Full of History
[Sergio whistling] – Nick Hoffman: Hey, Sergio!
– Sergio Gonzlez: Oh, hey, Nick!
You ready for our camping trip to Devil’s Lake?
– Oh, you betcha.
I’m all packed and ready to go.
– Oh, just go get your stuff then.
– All right.
Got this all set and ready to go.
– Uh, Nick, that’s an awfully big trunk.
Don’t you think a backpack would be better for our trip?
– A backpack?
No, this is my camping trunk.
I’ve got everything I need in here.
– What do you got?
– You know, the key supplies for any camping trip.
I’ve got my toaster, all right.
Some great comic books; that’s critical.
My laptop, just in case we need it.
– Listen, Nick, I think you might not be ready for a big camping trip to Devil’s Lake.
How about we stay a little more local?
We can go to the Wisconsin Historical Society and we can learn a little bit about the history of camping in state parks here in our state.
– All right, that’s always a great place to go.
I love to learn.
Can I still bring my comic books?
– I guess.
– All right, they’re gonna come in handy.
[upbeat music] [static hissing] So, Sergio, what is this?
– Well, Nick, it’s a trunk, a little bit like yours, but this one is from an agency called the Civilian Conservation Corps, which is an agency that existed all across the United States in the 1930s.
The Civilian Conservation Corps, known as the CCC, was one of several programs started by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The New Deal included programs and laws to address the major economic crisis of the time: The Great Depression.
The Great Depression began in 1929, and by 1933, many people in the U.S. were facing serious difficulties.
Unemployment was super high, around 25%, and people were struggling to cover basic needs like food and housing.
And basically, people needed something to do to be able to provide for their families.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected into office with promises of helping to put people back to work.
One of the ways he did that was to create a bunch of federal agencies.
They were called the alphabet agencies.
– Hold on, why the name “alphabet agencies?”
Well, there were a lot of U.S. federal government agencies created during Roosevelt’s presidency as part of his New Deal.
This meant a lot of new acronyms to refer to these agencies.
An acronym is usually just a short word made up of letters from other words.
So, the Civilian Conservation Corps’ name was often shortened to the acronym CCC.
Other well-known agencies from this period included the WPA, Works Progress Administration, and the PWA, or Public Works Administration.
With so many letters floating around to refer to these agencies, they were sometimes called the alphabet agencies or alphabet soup.
So Sergio, what was life like for people who worked in the CCC?
– Well, in many ways, the CCC tried to replicate kind of what army life would be like.
So if you were an enrollee, first, you’d be sent off to basic training to kind of learn the ins and outs of what it would be like to live in a camp.
And then you’d be shipped out to your specific designation, the camp you’d be working at.
You’d be living in a barracks with a bunch of other guys, and you’d wake up really early in the morning, have breakfast together in the mess hall, and then you’d be sent off to do work, basically all day, sunup to sundown, to do this work out in the great outdoors.
You’d come back at the end of the day, spend time together at the camp, have dinner, and then lights out, get ready to do it again the next day.
– About how many Wisconsinites were enlisted?
– Well, you know, there were about 3 million Americans that served in the CCC all across the United States.
Here in Wisconsin, about 92,000 men worked in different spaces doing the work that we’ve talked about, whether it was in logging, whether it was in fire prevention, whether it was in drought prevention.
Programs like the CCC were ways the federal government stepped in to help citizens get through this tough time.
Thousands of people were put to work thanks to these programs.
And not only did they help many people get through the Great Depression, but work by the CCC also helped conserve the country’s natural resources.
The CCC fought fires, built dams and structures to prevent soil erosion, planted billions of trees.
Yes, billions with a B, and more.
– So, what was this trunk for?
– Yeah, well, Nick, you may have filled your trunk with comic books and different things you wanna take for fun, but these trunks were really important to save everything that a young man might need when they were living out in a camp.
So, you might of course pack your extra uniforms inside in here.
You might have books that you would need to read during your off time.
This is where you’d keep the letters that you would have back from home.
So, these were really important trunks to hold everything that you might have.
– Do we know who used this trunk?
– Well, let’s take a look at it, Nick.
We get some clues here.
So stenciled across the top is the owner of this trunk.
His name was Werner F. Brunner.
He was a young man from Monticello, Wisconsin.
He was sent out to do work in La Crosse County.
And if we look here at the trunk, you can actually see the work he was doing.
He was involved in drought relief.
– Wow.
– So, he was making sure there’s enough water for the entire county during the Great Depression.
– That’s great, very cool.
Where would we see some of this work today?
– We have examples of it all across the state of Wisconsin, like Devil’s Lake State Park.
So, you can still visit them today and kind of see all of the work that the CCC men were involved in.
– Nick: Very cool.
I know Chequamegon National Forest is also a place where they did a lot of work.
– Sergio: Another great example.
The CCC was pretty amazing for its day, and it did an enormous amount of conservation work.
Planting trees, fighting fires, building park facilities, and more.
But remember, the CCC wasn’t open to anyone.
It was very much a product of its time.
And as this poster shows, it was only open to young, unmarried men.
In those days, they were expected to be the breadwinners.
That is, the people who earned money for their family.
To reinforce this, most of their monthly pay had to be sent home to their families.
So, if the total pay was about $30 a month, $25 of that was sent directly back to dependents or family members.
– And while Wisconsin and other states had racially-integrated camps, many camps in the South had separate Black and white camps.
The South was still highly segregated, and the CCC in those areas reflected that practice.
All this is to say there are a lot of sides to the CCC.
Being a good historian means trying to learn about these things and understand them.
So, this is all really neat stuff.
Do you have anything else that you can show us?
– Oh, Nick, we’ve got so much more.
Do you wanna go check it out?
– Yeah, absolutely.
– All right, let’s go.
– All right.
– Well, here we are, Nick, in the Wisconsin Historical Society.
What do you think?
– Yeah, it’s great.
They pulled some really great collections for us to look at, and we’ll see what we can learn.
– Yeah, so we’ve got some awesome primary sources that can help us understand the CCC, right?
These are some documents from the past that gives us a window into what life was like in these camps.
So tell me a little bit, what do you see here?
– All right, well, we’ve got some really cool pamphlets.
This one right here looks like it has some instructions.
No, this is great.
I mean, there’s illustrations about safety things, like how to carry a saw, using the shovel, felling a tree.
I mean, I imagine they’re gonna be doing this stuff all the time in their work.
– Absolutely; super helpful information right there.
– Here’s a photograph right here.
– Well, that’s amazing.
So that’s the inside, that’s the barracks.
– Far from spacious luxury digs, the CCC barracks were all about utility.
Each member was assigned a cot to sleep on and a sturdy trunk to store their things, all just an arm’s length away from their neighbor.
Oh, this is pretty fascinating.
It says, “The CCC, a young man’s opportunity to work, “to live, to learn, to build, and to conserve our national resources.”
So, this looks like it’s a recruitment poster.
– Yeah, one of the things we have to remember about these new federal programs that they had to get people to sign up for them.
So you might imagine this poster would’ve been plastered all across the city in which you live.
They’re trying to recruit young men to join and be a part of this conservation effort.
Well, Nick, what’d you think?
– That was a pretty great experience.
To see the trunk, to see the uniform, and the poster.
It really just gives me some great new perspectives on the past.
Anytime I go to a state park from now on, I’m gonna be thinking about whether or not the CCC did work there.
– That’s a good point.
New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps were super important to helping families survive the difficult years of the Great Depression.
They also had a huge impact on the country’s infrastructure.
Things like bridges and flood control, and on our natural landscape.
You can still see these impacts today when you visit many of Wisconsin’s state parks.
See if you can learn more about the state parks in your area.
Do any of them have a connection to the CCC?
Or imagine you were going to work for the CCC.
What kind of things would you wanna keep in your trunk?
I dunno about you, but I probably want some snacks in there just in case.
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