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Civilian Conservation Corps
by Randy Golden
exclusively for About North Georgia
As the country suffered the economic woes of The Great
Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt extolled the
virtues of hard work. It was in his acceptance of the
Democratic nomination for president in July, 1932 that
FDR began his conservation movement, proposing putting
city men to work restoring the country to its "former
beauty." According to Harry Rossoll, the Civilian
Conservation Corps, or CCC, was "a massive salvage
operation destined to become the most popular
experiment of the New Deal."
It was on the day of his inauguration that President
Roosevelt began creating an alphabet soup of agencies
to help battle the economic and social problems that
beset our country. In early March, 1933 he summoned
Congress to our nation's capitol and in an emergency
session on March 9th Congress heard his plan to enlist
250,000 men in an effort to "preserve the natural
resources of these United States." Surprisingly,
organized labor mounted a campaign against FDR's
proposal, however, the bill was signed into law on
March 31, 1933.
After passage of the act in 1933, Georgia quickly
found a way to eliminate blacks from participation in
the program. In spite of the unemployment rate for
blacks being twice the rate for whites, all blacks
were listed as "employed," making them ineligible to
participate in the CCC. However, by May, 1933,
Roosevelt called Democratic Governor Talmadge on the
carpet, threatening him by withholding every penny of
CCC money that would pour into the state. Talmadge
quickly reconsidered and agreed to permit Blacks entry
into the program, so long as they served in separate
camps.
For two years Georgia and other states admitted more
than 200,000 Black males into a program that over its
lifespan of 8 years saw a total of 2.5 million men
move through the camps. While early camps in northern
states were occasionally integrated, by 1934 there was
segregation throughout the organization. The presence
of a Negro CCC camp near a town or village anywhere in
the United States caused such problems that by 1934
the director of the program complained bitterly about
the general attitude towards Blacks. Enrollment of
these Americans into the Civilian Conservation Corps
was curtailed in 1935, with the silent approval of
Roosevelt.
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