Introduction

The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the earliest and one of the most popular programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was created in March 1933 as part of the “Hundred Days” package of programs intended to combat the myriad causes and effects of the Great Depression. Before it was shut down in the summer of 1942, the Corps recruited more than two and one-half million unemployed young men and placed them in army-run residential camps in mostly rural locations to work on natural resources conservation. We might think of it as an early “green” project. A Gallup poll in 1936 found 82 percent of the American people supporting the program, and another poll in 1939 found 11 percent picking it out of the extensive alphabet soup of programs in existence by then as “the greatest accomplishment” of the entire New Deal.

The numerous agencies of the New Deal have often been sorted into the categories of relief, recovery, or reform, but the CCC was one of several programs that actually embraced all three categories. Intended primarily as a work relief project for needy youth, it was also designed to promote economic recovery by sending most of the men’s pay back home to their families, thus increasing the purchasing power of consumers. But, in the minds of Roosevelt and many of the CCC administrators, the program was also going to reform the moral health of the nation’s youth while it promoted more rational conservation policies. As Sherwood Anderson put it after visiting a CCC camp: “They are making a new kind of American man out of the city boy in the woods, and they are planning at least to begin to make a new land with the help of such boys.”

The CCC had a complicated administrative structure—a direct result of the enormous logistical challenges associated with mobilizing large numbers of men from around the country and transporting them to designated work sites. The Departments of Labor, Agriculture, and Interior worked closely with the War Department in recruiting and supervising the men. The army, with its nine domestic Corps, provided the organizational framework for bringing the CCC to the states.

Pennsylvania, part of the army’s Third Corps area, proved to be one of the most successful state programs, uniquely characterized by an abundance of unemployed young men and plenty of conservation work to occupy them. The CCC was meant to alleviate the dual stresses of unemployment—the economic and the psychic—and Pennsylvanians were suffering these stresses to an appalling degree. But the Corps was also designed to relieve some of the stress on the land; here, too, Pennsylvania was in sore need.

The Depression that began in 1929 hit Pennsylvania particularly hard, creating a large number of potential recruits for CCC camps. In this regard Pennsylvania resembled other eastern states. It was also typical of eastern states in that many of its young recruits, particularly in the later years of the program, were sent out to western states where there was always more conservation work to be done than locally available men could handle. But Pennsylvania was also a bit like those western states in that it was able to employ the vast majority of its own men in its own work camps and was also able to absorb hundreds of men from other states, particularly in the early years.

The Keystone State was able to provide such abundant conservation work opportunities in part because irresponsible logging in earlier generations had produced environmental damage that needed restorative attention. But also, thanks mainly to Governor Gifford Pinchot, the state’s Department of Forests and Waters was able to provide an experienced cadre of trained foresters to supervise most of the conservation work done by the CCC in the state. Moreover, Pinchot’s administration had created a new State Emergency Relief Board (SERB), which in 1933 had the trained personnel to identify and recruit needy young men for the camps. The CCC utilized the labor of these young men in a variety of conservation activities in Pennsylvania, including planting trees, controlling erosion, building state park facilities, and restoring historic sites. The beauty and environmental health of large areas of the state still display the beneficial effects of that short-lived program.

But while the CCC provided immeasurable benefits for the unemployed men and the ravaged landscape they worked on, its operation in Pennsylvania also revealed the serious limitations of the entire program. Created as an emergency measure and rushed through Congress in little more than a week, many of its features were not well thought out. Although there is no doubt of the initial general enthusiasm that greeted the CCC, as time went on serious criticisms of the original plan surfaced. In particular, the speedy launching of the program in 1933 required a central role for the army in establishing and supervising the work camps. But the army’s role brought with it a pronounced military flavor that soon created problems of image as well as administrative conflicts with civilian administrators and ended up weakening the popularity and effectiveness of the program. Placing the educational activities of the camps, an add-on feature to the original scheme, under the authority of military officers turned out to be a particularly bad misstep.

A more general failing of the CCC was that it was only a partial solution to the problems of unemployment and conservation. It could not take all the young men who wanted to enroll, and a high percentage of those whom it did enroll it could not keep for the full enlistment period of six months. It undoubtedly provided colorful and even exciting benefits to many young men and their families, and its contributions to conservation were enormous. But its effectiveness would have been even greater if it had adopted a more varied approach to employing young people on conservation projects than the exclusive quasi-military model it followed.

Looked at from a contemporary perspective, the omission of women and the segregation of African-Americans stand out as the most glaring deficiencies of the CCC. Although these discriminations must be seen in the context of the more primitive social mores of the 1930s, they nonetheless weakened the CCC as both a relief measure and as a conservation program. In denying opportunities for women and limiting them for blacks, the CCC passed over many deserving young people and denied the land the benefits of their skills.

Because Pennsylvania had such a large and successful CCC program, it offers an ideal microcosm in which to study the successes and limitations of the CCC idea. It will be useful to begin by establishing the environmental, economic, and political context in which the state’s CCC camps were established.

A Wooded Land

Pennsylvania—“Penn’s Woods”—was given its name by King Charles II of England when he chartered the colony to William Penn in 1681. Penn himself, in modest Quaker fashion, would have preferred “New Wales” or “Sylvania,” but the king insisted and most inhabitants of the state ever since have thought it a felicitous decision. It certainly was a descriptive name, because at the beginning of European colonization probably all but 2 or 3 percent of the state’s 28 million acres were covered with thick forests. Today, about 58 percent of the state is wooded, but in the intervening years wholesale destruction of much of the state’s timber resources occurred, especially due to the irresponsible large-scale logging of the late nineteenth century.

The geography and climate of Pennsylvania produced and, for a while, protected its vast forests. The weather is temperate, with abundant rain and snow, and many of the tree-producing regions are in the relatively isolated middle and western portions of the state where two great mountain ranges run diagonally across the state from southwest to northeast—the Blue Mountain Range of ridge and valley in the center and the Appalachian Plateau in the west and north. These have been the areas of white pine and hemlock (the state tree). There is also a narrow range of beech, birch, and red maple along the sparsely settled northern border. Chestnut trees once comprised about 20 percent of all the state’s trees, some measuring seventeen feet in circumference and providing highly desirable lumber and bark as well as nourishing nuts. But around 1906 a fungus from China hit the state and the resultant “chestnut blight” destroyed virtually all those prized trees by 1940. It still attacks any chestnut sprouts hardy enough to surface.

Another major feature of Pennsylvania’s geography important to its forestry history is its river drainage system. The state has three major rivers with their various tributaries: (1) the Delaware River, fed by the Lehigh and Schuylkill, in the eastern third of the state; (2) the Susquehanna, including the Juniata, in the central portions; (3) the Ohio, created in Pittsburgh by the Allegheny and Monongahela, which drains the western third of the state. These river systems are strongly affected by the forests of the state whose roots and leaf canopies absorb and moderate much of the rain fall, thereby limiting soil erosion and floods. In addition, these rivers historically were linked to the forests as highways of commerce for the logging industry of the nineteenth century: workers floated logs or rafts of logs tied together downstream to the sawmills. The West Branch of the Susquehanna River, carrying logs to Lock Haven and Williamsport, was the most important of these watery boulevards.

The arrival of large-scale commercial lumbering around 1850 began to mar the look of the state and its ecology like nothing before or since. At that time, the small-enterprise timber industry, widely scattered and serving local markets, was replaced by enterprises operating on a hugely vaster scale and serving distant markets with virtually unlimited demand. This new phase of the industry had begun in Maine and then moved on to New York and Pennsylvania before heading to Michigan and other parts west later in the century. By the time the industry centered on Pennsylvania, its new character had evolved in particularly destructive ways. Lumber companies would purchase thousands of acres, set up logging camps and proceed to clear-cut the forests, usually in winter to facilitate the movement of logs across icy and frozen ground to streams soon to swell with springtime melting. After the logging companies had denuded the land of its trees, they abandoned it to tax delinquency sales, thereby leaving vast acres of unsightly stumps, unprotected soil, and volatile brush materials. Heavy rain would not be as easily absorbed by the root systems of trees or interrupted by their vegetation, and the erosion of topsoils would follow, scarring the land and contaminating downstream drinking water. Sudden torrents of run-off waters would also create flooding in downstream communities.

As a consequence of this destructive logging, the state’s heretofore isolated and untouched white pines, some rising 150 feet high and containing enough lumber to build a good-sized house, were almost completely eliminated. The state’s hemlocks were similarly devastated. Not only was hemlock lumber prized, but the bark was also in great demand by the tanning industry. Loggers would strip the bark, leaving the logs to dry out for months so that they would float better. But what often happened was that these logs would simply provide more fuel for uncontrolled forest fires that would sweep the ravaged areas, fires burning so hot that the soil itself would be damaged. Forests may eventually recover from this kind of damage, but without careful management, it can take up to 120 years for them to return to productive use. The first growths to spring up often are dominated by undesirable vegetation that hampers the return of the more valuable species. In Pennsylvania today there are only a few hundred acres of old growth forest, chiefly in the Alan Seeger Natural Area in Huntingdon County.

Near the beginning of this tragic story, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River in the center of the state, became the lumber capital of the world for a short time. Logs were cut and marked upstream and floated down the Sinnemahoning, the Loyalsock, the Clearfield, and other tributaries to be captured by “booms” down river. The boom at Williamsport served the several dozen large sawmills established there by midcentury. It was an enormous holding pen, eventually six miles around with a capacity of about one million logs. The spread of railroads later made it possible to transport logs without having to float them down rivers. The boom at Williamsport eventually became obsolete, and it was dismantled in 1909.

The demand for lumber continued to increase throughout the late nineteenth century, driving the reckless clearing of Pennsylvania’s forests. Although Michigan’s production surpassed that of Pennsylvania by 1870, the Keystone State continued to produce increasing amounts of board feet, not peaking until 1899. The end of Pennsylvania’s short-lived preeminence in the lumber industry was, in part, due to the simple fact that much of its readily accessible forest resources had been used up. It is estimated that by the turn of the twentieth century, only about nine million acres, or one-third of the state’s acreage, was still forested. Of what was left, fires consumed about 400,000 acres a year, and timber was actually being imported into “Penn’s Woods.” People used language like “desert” or “the Allegheny Briar Patch” in referring to the millions of acres of once prime timber lands then standing in ugly and ecologically dangerous conditions.

Fortunately, some far-sighted conservationists began to raise alarms and promote solutions. Among the earliest was Joseph Trimble Rothrock, “the Father of Pennsylvania Forestry.” Rothrock was born in McVeytown in Mifflin County in 1839 and educated at Freeland Seminary (which later grew into Ursinus College) and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a medical degree in 1867. He was instrumental in establishing the Pennsylvania Forestry Association in 1886, the first such state organization in the country, and became its first president. When the Pennsylvania Commission of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture was created in 1895, Rothrock became, logically, the first commissioner.

Although not formally trained as a forester, Rothrock was committed to promoting the new ideas of conservation. Over the next ten years he expanded the activities of his commission, especially in the area of fire protection. By the time he retired from his post in 1906 he had created a separate Department of Forestry in the governor’s cabinet, he had helped establish Pennsylvania’s first professional School of Forestry at Mont Alto, and he had professionally trained foresters in his employ. Rothrock was also successful in creating state-owned forest reserves, the first such lands being acquired through tax delinquency sales from logging companies.

A New Breed of Conservationist

After Rothrock, Pennsylvania was served by several capable and increasingly well-trained heads of the Department of Forestry. Of special note was Gifford Pinchot, who served under Governor William Sproul from 1920 to 1922. After Theodore Roosevelt, there was no more important individual in popularizing conservation ideals than Pinchot, and after Franklin Roosevelt, there was no more important individual in the establishment of the CCC in Pennsylvania.

Light years of social class, money, and education would seem to separate a privileged young man living in a Gilded Age mansion in upstate Pennsylvania from the down and out young men in the towns and farms of the same state in the Depression spring of 1933. But the 19,000 men from Pennsylvania who enrolled in the state’s first CCC camps that season, and the 165,000 who followed them over the next nine years, can be said to have been started on their adventures when James W. Pinchot recommended that his oldest son, about to head off to college, pursue a career in forestry.

The baronial estate was Grey Towers, built in the 1880s and still standing, overlooking the upper Delaware River just outside the Pocono Mountain town of Milford. It was James W. Pinchot of the family’s second generation who built Grey Towers as a summer house. In 1885 his oldest son, Gifford, who had been born in Simsbury, Connecticut, on August 11, 1865, was preparing to enter Yale, soon to become a family tradition. Gifford’s mother, Mary, née Eno, could trace her origins back to the founders of Connecticut and was from an even wealthier family than the Pinchots. Prospects were bright and assured for this young scion, but Gifford was still unsure of a specific career goal.

In a conversation pregnant with future significance for American politics and conservation, Father (always “Father” in Gifford’s charming and feisty autobiography, published posthumously in 1947) suggested forestry as a field in which the young man might find a career of useful service. Pinchot later recalled that at the time of this conversation, not only were there no forestry schools in the United States, but the country was also in the midst of “the most appalling wave of forest destruction in human history.” Although there had been some attempts at national and state levels to preserve woodlands, notably in Yellowstone National Park after 1872, conservation in the emerging sense of the rational management and utilization of finite resources was still largely viewed as unnecessary and, indeed, “ridiculous.”

After enrolling at Yale, Pinchot took as many science and botany courses as he could manage. But if he intended to pursue forestry as a career, he would have to continue his studies abroad. In contrast to America, where woodlands had always seemed limitless, in Europe the need to manage the finite resources of forests had long been recognized. Individuals were no longer allowed to cut and clear at will, leaving the topographical and environmental mess for someone else to clean up. Control of fires, erosion, and flooding were all dependent on the practice of scientific forestry, and there were several well-established schools of forestry in Europe.

Pinchot solicited advice from several quarters and decided to attend the French forestry school in Nancy. He attended classes for thirteen months, not completing the program but judging himself ready to manage forests and anxious to establish primacy in his chosen field. Upon his return to the United States, he essentially invented a career for himself and became the first American-born forester.

From the start of his career, Pinchot understood forestry as something altogether different from how it was commonly understood in his day. Several forestry organizations already existed in the United States, including the American Forestry Association in which James Pinchot had been active, but they were primarily devoted to the preservation of wilderness areas. In Pinchot’s mind, however, forestry was not primarily about preserving scenic beauty; it was about the systematic management of woodlands with a view to maximizing their “sustained yield.” It involved, for example, the periodic cutting down of mature trees, rather than letting them rot in untouched splendor. “Forestry is tree farming,” he wrote. “Forestry is handling trees so that one crop follows another. To grow trees as a crop is forestry.” Later on, when the U.S. Forestry Service produced a handbook on woodsmanship for the CCC, it instructed the young men in the same Pinchot-like philosophy: “Conservation means the preservation of natural resources for economic uses. . . . Forestry is the use of the land to grow a continuous crop of trees. Forestry does not mean the preservation of trees as in a park. . . . Forestry is as much a commercial undertaking as is the growth of farm crops.”

Turning down an offer from the U.S. Division of Forestry, Pinchot took the advice of Dr. Dietrich Brandis, a German forester who had become his mentor in Europe, and chose to gain experience in private forestry work before embarking on a career of public service. He did a little consulting work for timber companies and then was hired by George Vanderbilt to manage the forests at his Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. This work earned Pinchot a reputation in his young field, and when Bernhard E. Fernow (another German-born forester) retired as head of the Division of Forestry in 1898, Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson appointed Pinchot as his successor. The position now required a civil service test, which Pinchot was obliged to make up himself! Before he had the opportunity to take it, however, President William McKinley stepped in and waived the requirement.

The next eleven years were busy ones for Pinchot. He oversaw the expansion of the division into a bureau and then into the United States Forestry Service. Meanwhile, he also helped establish the Society of American Foresters in 1900 and set up summer camps in forests to provide work for college students, an interesting foreshadowing of the CCC. He and his family helped establish the Yale School of Forestry in 1900, with summer classes available on their Milford estate. Pinchot continued in his government post under Theodore Roosevelt, and by the end of Roosevelt’s second term in 1909, Pinchot had become the acknowledged leader of the young and growing cadre of American foresters and an articulate ally of the president on conservation matters. One of his successors as forester, William B. Greeley, later remembered the aura Pinchot projected in the field: “Pinchot was very much a man’s man. He could outride and outshoot any ranger on the force. If camp was within a mile of a stream of any size, he invariably had his morning plunge; and if the stream came from a snowbank a few miles up-canyon, all the better.”

After Roosevelt left office, Pinchot kept his position in the new administration of William Howard Taft but was uneasy with some of the new president’s appointments from the corporate world. He soon involved himself in a dispute with one of those appointees, Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger, over the disposition of some Alaskan lands. The ensuing “Ballinger-Pinchot controversy” resulted in the forester’s publicly and rashly criticizing the secretary and, implicitly, the president. Taft, described later by Pinchot as “weak rather than wicked,” fired him for insubordination and thereby raised a storm of criticism that soon spread to other Taft policies and eventually returned Theodore Roosevelt to the national arena as the Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” candidate for president in 1912.

Pinchot, of course, supported Roosevelt in 1912 and in the same year was invited by freshman New York State Senator Franklin D. Roosevelt to give a slide show to the state legislature on the need for forest conservation. This was the beginning of a personal and professional relationship between the two men that continued for the rest of their lives.

The Bull Moosers carried Pennsylvania in 1912, but Pinchot’s own political ambitions in his home state were blocked by the Republican machine in Pennsylvania, headed by Senator Boies Penrose. Nevertheless, in time he managed his way into state government when Governor William S. Sproul appointed him Pennsylvania commissioner of forests in 1920. He proved, unsurprisingly, an active commissioner, reorganizing the department and setting up twenty-four forestry districts with a trained forester supervising each. He also created the best forest fire protection system in the country, acquired some 77,000 acres of additional forest land for the state, and succeeded in getting his appropriations doubled, thereby increasing salaries and morale in his department. His nurseries were able to distribute three million seedlings to the owners of private forests for erosion protection.

Pinchot was also helpful in improving the first state forestry school at Mont Alto, which began offering bachelor of science degrees in forestry, thus expanding the pool of trained foresters in the state. Although state purchases of forest reserves during his tenure were modest in scope, the federal government had created the Allegheny National Forest in the western part of the state in 1921, bringing an additional 400,000 acres of the state’s forests under professional management. One student of this phase of Pinchot’s career sums up his work as commissioner as having provided “strong executive leadership, dynamic public relations, and diversified forest work.”

With the death of Penrose in 1921, the political path was cleared for Pinchot to run for governor. Elected in 1922, he moved quickly to implement bureaucratic reforms designed to promote his conservation ideas. He combined the Department of Forestry with some other agencies to create a Department of Forests and Waters. The new department was headed for a while by one of Pinchot’s protégés, Robert Y. Stuart, who went on to become forester in the United States Forest Service and an important ally of President Franklin Roosevelt in getting the CCC off the ground in 1933.

This increasingly professional attention to managing Penn’s Woods meant that by the time the CCC was created in 1933, Pennsylvania’s forests had recovered significantly from their low point at the turn of the century. Forests now covered about sixteen million acres, including about two million under state supervision. Most of the CCC camps would be established on these state-managed lands.

Nevertheless, not all was well in the state’s forests. Aside from the chestnut tree blight, there were other dangers arising, chiefly gypsy moth destruction of oak trees and the white pine blister rust. But the most serious problem continued to be the annual scourge of forest fires. Fires were caused accidentally by lightning or careless campers, but sometimes they were deliberately set as protests against large corporate absentee land owners. But the railroads were the chief culprits. Sparks emitted by locomotives and fires set by railroad clean-up crews were the causes of most fires. Although Pinchot had begun to build steel watch towers and improve communications, fires still burned several hundreds of thousands of acres a year, mainly in the spring after the snows had melted and before the green foliage had matured. The fall was the second most dangerous season, when the leaf protection of the summer fell as potential kindling onto the forest floor.

There would be plenty of forestry work, then, for the young men of the CCC when they began pouring into Pennsylvania’s work camps in May 1933. The state’s Department of Forests and Waters during Governor Pinchot’s second term in 1933 would be ready to cooperate with the program by providing plenty of work projects and trained forester supervisors. With the possible exception of California, no other state was as well prepared to effectively utilize CCC labor as was Pennsylvania. And the Depression, which had hit the state particularly hard, would ensure that there was plenty of labor available for conservation work.

The Great Depression in Pennsylvania

When President Roosevelt signed the legislation creating the CCC on March 31, 1933, the Depression was three and a half years old and seemingly worsening with every month. Banks had closed, businesses had failed, and breadlines curled around blocks in the major cities. Among the growing numbers of unemployed, perhaps as many as two million, mostly men under thirty-five, were on the road, riding the rails, hitching rides, or just walking from town to town in search of work or simply to give the families they left behind a greater chance of receiving the meager relief help still available. Among these unhappy wanderers were uncounted numbers of teen-aged “tramps” who roamed the country, looking for work or excitement or just escaping domestic squalor. One undercover study of five hundred of these homeless children counted fifty-five of them from Pennsylvania, the highest number from any state in the sample.

The older unemployed tended to stay put, selling apples on street corners, looking for odd jobs, or setting up “Hooverville” housing out of the detritus of a collapsed industrial society. Many discouraged men and women simply idled away, hoping something would turn up, while increasing stress built up within families. Families were staring at “nameless horrors” creeping toward them from “out of the darkness,” and reactions wavered over a narrow spectrum from fear through numbness to outright rebelliousness in proportions historians still argue about.

The people of Pennsylvania were especially hard hit. The population of the state was more than nine million in 1930, ranking second in the nation behind New York. It was a curious state in that its urban population of six and a half million ranked it second, again behind New York, but its rural population of three million also ranked second (this time behind Texas). The state’s post–Civil War reliance on heavy industry made it particularly vulnerable to the Depression since those industries were harder hit than the service economy. Moreover, most of the people in the rural areas were dependent on the state’s farms, and agriculture was, if anything, in even worse shape, accelerating the downward slide begun in the 1920s.

Agriculture was not the only economic sector in the state that had not fully shared in the uneven boom years of the Roaring Twenties. Some industries vitally important to the state’s economy, such as coal mining and textile manufacturing, had barely held their own in the decade since World War I had ended. Unemployment in Philadelphia, famed for the diversity of its manufacturing sector, was above 10 percent in the year before the Depression started. In the Pittsburgh area employment in steel industries in 1929 was 40 percent below what it had been in 1923. According to the director of industrial relations in Pennsylvania, average wages in Pennsylvania’s manufacturing industries were among the lowest in the Northeast and about 33 percent lower than in New York. Sweatshops still existed in the state, paying women $4 a week, less than the standard relief grant.

In July 1932, the Community Council of Philadelphia described unemployment in the city as so bad that it was creating conditions of “slow starvation and progressive disintegration of family life.” Tuberculosis rates in the state had recently doubled, and more than one-quarter of school children in the state were said to be undernourished. Relief funds, heretofore the responsibility of local county boards but now supplemented by the limited funds the state provided after 1931, were near exhaustion with many families receiving less than $3 a week in assistance.

Governor Pinchot’s analysis of the causes of the Depression stirred him to righteous anger. He blamed the Depression on “the most astounding concentration of wealth in the hands of a few men that the world has ever known.” Citing a Federal Trade Commission study in 1926 showing that 1 percent of Americans owned 60 percent of the nation’s wealth, Pinchot argued that the purchasing power of consumers could not keep up with the rising productivity of the economy. Once the Depression hit and wages fell faster than prices, the problem of underconsumption was compounded and cutbacks and layoffs resulted in further decreases in purchasing power.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, statistical bottoms were being plumbed in terms of unemployment and business failures. Curiously, in a nation obsessed with size and statistics, there were as yet no reliable United States government figures on unemployment, but estimates by various private organizations (supported by later studies done by the Department of Labor) suggest a national unemployment rate of about 25 percent in March 1933.

The situation was even worse in Pennsylvania. In 1929 Pennsylvania had more than 17,000 individual manufacturing establishments, second only to New York. By 1933 about 5,000 of these were completely gone, and the others operating at low capacity, with devastating effects on employment levels. Governor Pinchot reported in early 1933 that only about 40 percent of the state’s workforce was fully employed, with about 30 percent employed half-time or less, and another 30 percent, or 1.5 million people, without any jobs at all.

Among young workers under twenty-four, many of whom were about to be recruited into the CCC, the numbers were often double the general figure. African-Americans, traditionally “the last hired and first fired,” were also among the hardest hit. In Pittsburgh, the black unemployment rate was near 50 percent, and 43 percent of black families were on the relief rolls. In Philadelphia, black Americans constituted 13 percent of the city’s population but about 33 percent of those on relief in 1932. But relief assistance in the city, faced with unprecedented demand and reduced funds, was providing only 20 percent of what had been given on a per capita basis in 1928.

This matter of relief assistance was about to undergo major changes in the 1930s. Traditionally, relief for the indigent and needy in Pennsylvania had come from private charity groups and was given in kind—food and fuel benefits especially. There was also a small amount of public relief, administered by the state’s 425 local boards of assistance. When unemployment was relatively low, relief was generally given only to “unemployables”—the aged, the infirm, and the caregivers of dependent children. Potential recipients would have to be investigated by case workers for worthiness and then provided supervised assistance in managing their meager resources.

But with the economic catastrophe of the 1930s, the numbers of people in need exploded and now included growing numbers of “employables” as well. By 1932 two million of the state’s nine million people, were receiving some kind of relief, the highest totals in the country. The private charities in Philadelphia even tried some creative experiments in providing work relief that year but found it to be about three times as expensive as giving relief in kind and productively inefficient as well. Sherman Kingsley, the executive director of the Welfare Federation of Philadelphia, sniffed to Governor Pinchot that some of the unskilled people reporting to work relief projects did not even have “proper clothing.”

The need for assistance was so great that by the summer of 1932 the Philadelphia Committee on Unemployment Relief, set up in 1930 to coordinate private charity assistance, had to disband when it ran out of funds to disburse, including the $5 million in public funds granted to it by the city and the state. This collapse of relief in the city left some 57,000 families in the city with no help at all; some reportedly lived on dandelions. This was happening in Philadelphia, the third largest city in the country—Philadelphia, “famed for its quiet wealth, its good food, its day-time naps and its savage conservatism.” A similar organization in Pittsburgh, the Allegheny County Emergency Association, set up in 1931, also had to disband in 1932 for lack of resources.

In some parts of the state cases of tuberculosis and pellagra were doubling. Forty percent of the state’s school children were reportedly suffering from malnutrition, and in some counties in the southwestern part of the state many children were eating only every other day. Thousands of coal miners, evicted from company housing after a strike against conditions so desperate that they staged it in the slack demand summer of 1931, were reportedly living, three or four families to a room, in hillside shacks, subsisting on weed roots. In 1933, workers all over the state in textile manufacturing and coal mining began staging grassrooted wildcat strikes, often in the face of established union leadership opposition. It is impossible to analyze the causes of these 1933 strikes in isolation from the new hope the Roosevelt administration, especially its National Recovery Administration, had kindled in desperate people. On the other hand, without the desperation caused by the Depression, there would have been no fear of lighting the dangerous emotion of hope in the first place.

When the New Deal’s Harry Hopkins sent investigators from the newly established Federal Emergency Relief Administration into the state in 1933, they found woeful deficiencies in Pennsylvania’s relief system. There was inefficient distribution of food, clothing, and fuel and widespread resentment by workers throughout the state of local relief boards that were dominated by the wealthy and employer classes. Lorena Hickock described the unemployed in Pennsylvania as “right on the edge” in a mood that would not take much more to make communists out of them. With such a Dickensian pall spreading everywhere in the state and no hopeful solutions in sight, it is no wonder some feared that a “Red Menace” might spread.

The patent inability of charities or local governments across the country to meet the unprecedented need for assistance was leading some to look to state governments for help. While still governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt led the way, setting up a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) in 1931 and appointing Harry Hopkins, a former social worker from Chicago, as its head. Both Hopkins and his chief firmly believed in the superiority of work relief over direct grants of goods or cash, and the TERA did set up some small-scale work relief projects. One such project involved entraining unemployed young men from New York City up to Bear Mountain for some forestry work. The considerable additional expenses involved in setting up these work projects, however, prevented them from becoming more than interesting previews of later New Deal programs like the CCC and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Governor Pinchot was not far behind in involving his state government in the deepening relief crisis in Pennsylvania. In November 1931 he began exchanging ideas with other governors about the problems they all faced. He then called the Pennsylvania legislature into special session (he would do this again in 1932 and 1933) and prevailed upon them to appropriate $10 million of state money for relief. Pennsylvania thus became the third state in the country (behind New York and New Jersey) to bring this new kind of state assistance to local relief efforts. To provide for more effective distribution of this money, the legislature in 1932 reorganized the whole system of public relief in the state. A State Emergency Relief Board (SERB) was set up with Eric Biddle of Ardmore as its first director, and it was now charged with distributing state relief money to local emergency relief boards in the counties.

Like Roosevelt, Pinchot used some of the limited state relief money for small-scale work relief projects. One program set up six work camps for housing some of the 25,000 unemployed men put to work for the Highway Administration, yet another sneak preview of the CCC idea. The state National Guard and the Health Department set up these tent camps, each of which housed between seventy and ninety men. Unlike the later CCC camps, these were integrated, with blacks and whites living and working together. The number of applicants far exceeded the positions, and men lined up well before dawn on registration days. Those rejected often left in tears. The lucky ones were given thirty days’ work and army surplus clothing. The three meals a day the men received resulted in reported weight gains of between five and fifteen pounds.

Pinchot also anticipated the CCC in seeing the woods of Pennsylvania as assets in the attempt to alleviate distress and unemployment. The state Department of Forests and Waters employed 1,100 men to cut 10,000 cords of free firewood for needy families. The men also were engaged in other forestry projects in return for food relief.

Despite this unprecedented state involvement in relief matters, Pinchot realized that the needs were beyond what budgetary and political realities in Pennsylvania could provide. He consequently became one of the earliest and loudest voices in the country for federal relief assistance. He sent a public letter to President Herbert Hoover on August 18, 1931, asking for federal assistance on relief, and he followed the letter up with speeches on the subject in Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington.

Unfortunately, Hoover’s ideological rigidity prevented him from formulating any imaginative policy initiatives to combat the Depression. He had, somewhat reluctantly, in 1932 agreed to the establishment of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which was later empowered to make loans to states. Pinchot was able, with the expenditure of much energy, to wheedle $30 million in loans from the RFC for distribution by the SERB, but he was pushing up against Pennsylvania’s constitutionally fixed debt limits and was frustrated by Hoover’s refusal to provide grants to the states.

By the time Roosevelt took office in 1933, state resources in Pennsylvania were stretched to the limit, no more aid was coming from Washington, and desperation was deepening among Pennsylvania’s unemployed. Pennsylvania had to weather the winter of 1932–33 with no additional funds until the establishment in May 1933 by President Roosevelt of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), with Harry Hopkins in charge. The FERA was empowered to give grants to the states, and Pennsylvania would receive $196 million from this agency before it was abolished in 1935 and replaced by the federal work relief projects of the WPA, also headed by Hopkins, and the Social Security Administration, which continued the federal subsidies to the states for assisting the unemployables. The creative energy of the New Deal, as expressed in these programs as well as the CCC, was happily greeted throughout the state and resulted in major political shifts.

The Political Scene

The major theme of Pennsylvania politics from the Civil War era down to 1934 is a simple one of Republican Party domination. Democrats were able to elect only one governor in all that time and no United States senators. Republicans also carried the state in all the presidential elections except 1912, when the ex-Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, managed to win a plurality of the vote in a three-way race with William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. In the two major cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the story was a similar one of long-lived Republican Party hegemony. The party’s strengths were rooted in Civil War memories, a large population residing in small towns and on small farms, and an organization that had grown up symbiotically with the big business interests of the state and had learned to tap those interests for whatever campaign funds were needed.

The Democratic Party of the state, in the words of one scholar of the subject, “barely existed” by the 1920s. In the gubernatorial election of 1926 it failed to carry even one of the state’s sixty-seven counties. In some places, like Philadelphia, it was a “kept” party, kept around by Republican bosses by means of minor patronage and rental payments on its offices as a means of insuring the nomination of eminently beatable candidates and useful allies. But the times, they were a-changing.

The Depression, and the widespread perception that Hoover was both unable and unwilling to deal with the problems of mass suffering and insecurity, would provide the Democrats with an opening—if they could seize it and run with it. Electoral success for the party was almost guaranteed in 1932, no matter whom it ran against Hoover, but continued success would demand bold and imaginative departures from the conservative leadership the national party had reverted to in the 1920s. The electoral coalition the Democrats created in the turbulence of the Depression would be a precarious one and one that would have to be exploited with creative intelligence and compassionate rhetoric. Once created, however, it would provide the party with a “permanent majority” that would endure for almost two generations until the white south began to slip away in the 1960s.

The man at the center of this political opportunity for the Democrats was, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt, often considered the greatest president of the twentieth century. Looking back at Roosevelt from the vantage point of the 1960s, the high noon of twentieth-century liberalism, several New Left historians found him seriously wanting in his commitment to liberal change. Looking back at Roosevelt, however, from the vantage point of this writing, through the denser atmosphere of the “Twilight of the Left,” assessments of his achievements are bound to be more friendly. More important, if we try not to look backward at Roosevelt at all, but rather forward with him and the country from 1932 onward, we can perhaps regain a sense of the impressive achievements of his presidency and the indispensable contributions of Roosevelt himself. And nowhere else was his contribution more central than in the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

It is important to remind ourselves of the intense emotions that Roosevelt evoked from his contemporaries, ranging from conservative denunciations of “That Man” to the kind of adulation he inspired in his supporters. One of these stalwart supporters was Senator Joseph F. Guffey, one of Pennsylvania’s leading Democrats, who later wrote of him: “I probably saw him as often as anyone. . . . I can only say that in a long and busy lifetime I have never known a greater man, and in the perspective of the years his shadow grows longer as his stature becomes more clearly perceived.” Most of the men who served in the CCC would not argue with Guffey’s assessment.

Roosevelt and his New Deal had an even more profound impact on the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania than did the Depression. After all, even with unemployment soaring in the state after 1929, Republicans still managed to elect Pinchot in 1930, maintain majorities in both state houses, elect David Reed as United States senator in 1932, win twenty-three of the state’s thirty-four congressional seats, and carry the state for Hoover that same year. The Democrats in Pennsylvania had a difficult upward climb ahead of them.

A pivotal figure in this Democratic story is, curiously, the Republican Gifford Pinchot. As an old Bull-Moose Republican and an ardent conservationist, Pinchot’s ideological orientation was very different from the laissez-faire conventional wisdom of the triumphal Republicans of the 1920s and closer to that of the two Roosevelts. Moreover, Pinchot and Franklin Roosevelt were linked by personal friendships. The friendship of their wives, Eleanor Roosevelt and Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, was even older, dating from their childhoods.

Pinchot formally remained a Republican in the 1930s, and his relationship with Democrats proved complex and prickly. He welcomed Roosevelt’s national policies on relief and appreciated the support the president urged on Democratic state legislators for his own program in 1933. He also cooperated with the Democratic State Committee in the early months of the CCC in helping them get foremen positions in the camps. But when his term was nearing its end in 1934, he engaged in some serio-comical negotiations with state Democrats in the hopes of running for United States senator on a ticket with George H. Earle, the Democratic candidate for governor that year. These hopes were dashed by a bitter dispute that erupted between Pinchot and Joseph F. Guffey, who coveted the Senate seat for himself.

Guffey’s election to the Senate in 1934 effectively ended Pinchot’s political career. Pinchot made futile efforts to receive the Republican presidential nomination in 1936 and to regain his old governor’s seat in 1938, but his health was not good. He suffered from shingles and a series of heart attacks in 1939 weakened him until, at last, he died of leukemia on October 4, 1946.

Meanwhile, the New Deal had an immediate impact on Pennsylvania’s economy, which translated into unprecedented success for the Democrats in the 1934 elections. Thanks to successful relief programs, including the CCC, the FERA, and the Civil Works Administration (CWA), not only did Guffey become Pennsylvania’s first Democratic senator but George Earle became only the second Democratic governor since the Civil War. The stage was set for Pennsylvania’s “Little New Deal” in the middle years of the decade. Roosevelt’s New Deal had played the most important role in this revival of the state’s Democrats, and the CCC was one of the most popular of its programs contributing to that revival.

Chapter 1

The First Year of the CCC in Pennsylvania

On Sunday afternoon, June 2, 1933, the Philipsburg American Legion staged a formal flag-raising ceremony, officially opening CCC Camp S-71 in Moshannon State Forest. Two days previously, two hundred young recruits had been trucked from the local train station to their new home. They had arrived in a heavy rain to find no shelter awaiting them, only a field of brush and tree stumps. But they immediately set to work clearing the site and setting up army tents and soon were eating a light supper in the mess hall tent before they prepared for their first night’s sleep in the woods.

The saga of the early days at Camp S-71 was being repeated, with only slight variations, all over Pennsylvania (indeed, all over the country) in those late spring days of 1933. Setting up tents, sometimes in the dark, bathing in streams, using ditch latrines—only the high spirits of youth embarked on interesting new experiences can account for all the singing, according to many reports, that went on in these early days of roughing it and “taking it.”

The magnitude of placing 300,000 men in CCC camps in less than three months that spring was an accomplishment dazzling in its complexity and colorful in its execution. President Roosevelt’s program of Emergency Conservation Work (ECW), the original official title of the CCC, was speedily passed by Congress and signed into law on March 31. On April 3 Roosevelt held a meeting at the White House where the basic organization of the CCC was established. The president, in an off-handed way, drew up a simple chart leading down from Robert Fechner of the Machinists Union, whom he had already appointed as its first director. From Fechner lines went down to the Departments of Labor, War, Agriculture, and Interior. These cabinet secretaries would appoint representatives to an Advisory Council under Fechner. Labor would recruit the young men in cooperation with state relief agencies, the army would condition them and manage the work camps, and Interior and Agriculture would supervise the conservation work. This Rube Goldberg set-up appears an administrative nightmare on paper and occasionally led to friction, but it was actually an ideal framework in which to get the emergency program up and running in a hurry. It seems a typically New Deal approach—pragmatic, flexible, make it up as you go along, and avoid too much straitjacket precision in drawing lines of authority. And over top of it all was the president, who had conceived the project and almost willed it into existence on his own.

By April 17, in an impressive feat of organization, the first recruits were in the first camp—Camp Roosevelt of course—in the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. Camps in Pennsylvania began to appear about a week later. The Keystone State provided ideal conditions for the CCC. With a large percentage of its population in economic distress, Pennsylvania could supply abundant recruits for the work camps. In 1933 Governor Pinchot was reporting that two million Pennsylvanians were receiving some kind of relief assistance and he claimed that 12 percent of the nation’s unemployed lived in his state. Those unemployed included many young men who were soon to be working in the CCC, receiving salaries of $30 a month. Since most of that money (usually $25 in the early years of the program) would be sent home to the men’s families, many of whom were receiving public assistance, the state’s relief expenditures could be correspondingly reduced. Dorothy C. Kahn of the Philadelphia Relief Board was expecting savings of $80,000 a month.

Aside from needy people, Pennsylvania also had an abundance of needy forests. Although conditions had improved considerably since the turn of the century, there were still plenty of backed-up maintenance and improvement projects in the state that would easily absorb most of the manpower the CCC would provide over the next nine years. Moreover, the Depression had forced cuts in the operating budget of the Department of Forests and Waters, which would be more than made up for by new federal spending on CCC work.

Pennsylvania also had an abundance of publicly owned land where CCC camps could be placed. The legislation creating the ECW program, in one of its few specific mandates, had required all conservation work done by the CCC to be on publicly owned property, with only a few exceptions made for work on private lands when such work would be crucial to fire and flood protection or to the treatment of tree disease. The ECW office in Washington constantly prodded state officials across the country to begin establishing state parks or state forests or to expand their limited holdings, but Pennsylvania’s two million acres of publicly owned lands—the Allegheny National Forest, state forests, state parks and state game lands—were sufficient to keep most of its CCC men occupied and would not have to be added to during the decade of Depression.

Launching the CCC in Pennsylvania

The creation of the CCC created intense curiosity, interest, and excitement throughout Pennsylvania. On April 3, before any specific plans had been set up in Washington, a crowd of two thousand hopeful young men, dressed in their Sunday best, converged on the State Employment Bureau in downtown Philadelphia. The officials there had, as of yet, received no instructions and had to send the disappointed young men home.

After an Executive Order issued by President Roosevelt on April 5 had established policies and procedures, the Labor Department set enrollment quotas, based on the populations of the various states. Roosevelt’s early goal was to put 250,000 men in camps by midsummer, and Pennsylvania was initially given 19,500 of these places to fill. These first recruits in 1933 were required to be American citizens, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, single, and unemployed, with needy family dependents. The pay of these “Juniors” would be $30 a month, but most of that would be sent home in allotment checks. Young African-Americans joining the CCC would be assigned to separate “Colored” camps.

On April 22 Roosevelt authorized the recruitment of a second category of unemployed men—local experienced men (LEMs). Both Governor Pinchot and General Paul Malone of the army’s Third Corps, which included Pennsylvania, were worried about creating dangerous resentment among locally unemployed men by bringing large numbers of outsiders into their midst. Pinchot, in particular, expressed his fears that these jobless men might resort to arson in protest, a tactic with some precedent in the forests of his state.

These LEMs were not subject to age or marital requirements and were not required to allot any of their pay to family dependents. They often served as work supervisors and received upgraded pay ratings. They also were not required to live in camp, although some did. Pennsylvania’s CCC quota was adjusted to include 18,200 Juniors and 1,300 LEMs.

Another category of unemployed men for CCC camps was added on May 11 when unemployed World War I veterans, some of whom had come to Washington on a “Bonus March,” were allowed to be recruited into separate work camps. In Pennsylvania, the recruitment of 1,950 veterans brought the first summer’s total to 21,450. Like Junior camps, Veterans’ camps were segregated by race. Their camps tended to be a bit more relaxed than Junior camps. Most of the men were in their midforties and tended to remain in the CCC almost twice as long as did Juniors. Beer was sold in their camp canteens and sometimes affected adversely their reputations in rural areas. Moreover, local relief officials sometimes complained about veterans moving their families to communities near their camps where they often became a drain on local relief funds.

As the CCC continued to add categories of the unemployed to its camps, one group of the unemployed notably missing was, of course, women. The need of women for relief and for jobs was critical but not uppermost in the minds of most New Dealers. Eleanor Roosevelt had suggested that some homeless women might be put to work in CCC-run tree nurseries, but nothing came of it. Later, the FERA, the WPA, and the National Youth Administration (NYA) set up some “She-She-She” work camps, but the CCC remained an organization for men only. A very small number of nonresident women did work in CCC camps as secretaries or teachers, and there was enough interest among women that the Labor Department had to draft a “Dear Madam” form letter to respond to queries from unemployed women. Occasionally young women would receive, by mistake, invitations to join the CCC. One such recipient in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, wrote back to the local welfare office: “I ain’t no boy I am a girl, but if they have a girls camp let me no at once.” Even though that particular office could not fill its quota that month, the girl’s application was not accepted.

As a first step in the recruiting process, W. Frank Persons, appointed by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to head the selection process, called a start-up meeting in Washington on April 5, to which relief officials of the seventeen largest eastern cities were invited. Philadelphia was represented at this meeting by Dorothy Kahn, director of the Philadelphia County Relief Board, and Pittsburgh by George P. Mills, director of the Allegheny County Relief Board. In addition, Persons invited F. Richard Stilwell, field representative of the recently established State Emergency Relief Board, whom he had appointed state selector for Pennsylvania. Persons assigned quotas for each of these cities: 3,000 for Philadelphia and 900 for Pittsburgh, and the officials returned home to begin setting up the selection process. On May 26, Persons appointed two Veterans Administration officials, H. J. Crosson in Philadelphia and E. R. Bunke in Pittsburgh, as selectors for the 1,950 veterans to be recruited in the state.

In the days following his meeting with Persons, Stilwell meted out the remainder of the state’s enrollee quota to the relief boards in the smaller towns. They were instructed to pick men who would agree to send $25 of their monthly pay home as allotments to their families, but this was not always done. They were also told to give priority in their selections to young men whose families were receiving public relief assistance, but this advisory was not always followed either. For example, the family of Bob Ward, who was at Camp S-91 in 1933, owned a dairy farm outside Wellsboro in 1933. Although they were poor, they were never on relief.

Philadelphia sent off the first of its enrollees on April 7, 1933. They were reported as “fine specimens, decidedly under par physically” but “eager to go.” Among the first enrollees were Joe Wallace, age twenty-four, 5 feet 2 inches, 98 pounds, the sole support of his parents and sister, and John Phillips, one of seventeen children. Members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom provided the young men with box lunches and went down to the train station in a morning rain shower to send them off. In Pittsburgh relief officials had reviewed 2,000 applications for their first 900 places.

What inspired these men to come forward and apply for CCC work encompassed a broad range of motives. Intrafamily tension arising from too many people idling in poverty with no purposive activity undoubtedly was a key factor. Many CCC men later remembered simple hunger as an important motivator. Some parents, eyeing the allotment checks, often drove sons to apply. And, of course, the simple explanation of young men seeking activity, adventure, and structure probably accounted for the bulk of applications. As R. F. Hammett of the Forestry Service pointed out, most of the young men coming into CCC camps in Pennsylvania from the larger cities had never seen a mountain in their life and “they had never seen the woods.” At the other extreme were some young men from rural parts of the state who had never seen a black person until their CCC travels.

As time went by and CCC men returned home with improved appearances and stories to tell of camp life (some of them undoubtedly true), other motives began inspiring new waves of recruits. James McEntee, the second director of the CCC, described the appeal of the CCC experience to young men: “They like to see their muscles grow strong, their backs, arms and faces tan from the outdoor work. In sharp contrast to the frail, oft-times undernourished lads who frequently are admitted to the Corps as rookies, are the husky, tanned youth who have been in the CCC for a time—confident young fellows who have learned what a job is and that they are capable of doing it.”

When a young man was approved as a CCC recruit by his local relief board in these early years, he would then report to one of the army collecting stations where he would be officially enrolled. In Pennsylvania these were located in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Altoona, Johnstown, Williamsport, Allentown, Easton, Pottsville, Reading, Butler, Erie, Greensburg, Uniontown, Wilkes-Barre, and Scranton. He would have to make his own way there, sometimes a considerable distance for the men from small towns, and he was told to bring a small suitcase of clothing and personal effects as well as a lunch. The first thirty enrollees from Lewistown were dismayed to learn that they would have to get to Harrisburg on their own the following day. The prospect of hitchhiking and spending a night “maybe in jail” did not, however, dampen their determination to sign up. There were other instances of men making their way to army recruiting stations, only to be told that they could not be enrolled that day. These young men would then have to go back home and return on some other day. This often presented hardships for those who had traveled some distance by their own effort and expense.

At the army collecting station the young recruit was given a physical exam and, if he passed, was sworn into the CCC and given a series of inoculation shots for typhoid and smallpox. An experimental shot for pneumonia was offered as an option later in the decade. He was now a “Junior” enrollee and from here on the army would assume responsibility for him. He was then given transportation to one of the army bases in his area that served as conditioning camps for the men before they were assigned to one of the conservation work camps.

For Pennsylvania men, the conditioning camps set up to receive them were: Forts Meade, Hoyle, Howard, Washington, and the Holabird Quartermaster Depot in Maryland; Forts Myer, Humphreys, Monroe, and Stoky, and Langley Field in Virginia; and the Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. Fort Meade took more of the Pennsylvania boys than the others, especially those from Philadelphia. Although the Aberdeen, Maryland, Proving Grounds were also nearby, that fort’s commander warned off the adjutant-general from sending any CCC men there. Not only was sensitive weapons research taking place on the grounds, but the whole base was full of dangerous explosive devices—a very unsuitable place to have large numbers of curious and active boys poking about! As time went on, these conditioning camps were phased out and later recruits were received directly into the conservation work camps in the states.

These military bases and all the Pennsylvania work camps were located in the army’s Third Corps, which had its administrative headquarters in Baltimore, commanded by General Paul Malone until he was replaced in 1935. Malone was born in Middletown, New York, in 1872, graduated from West Point, and had seen action in Cuba, the Philippines, and France, where he was awarded the Legion of Honor. His Third Corps responsibility also included the camps in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

On the army bases the recruit was given a healthier diet than he was usually accustomed to back home and outfitted with army work clothes. His time, over the next week or two, would be spent in a physical program of calisthenics, light work around the camp, and getting used to the experience of group living. Some men would face problems of homesickness, bad reactions to inoculation shots, and occasional hostility from army recruits on the base who were, fortunately for the CCC recruits, relatively few in number after Depression cutbacks in personnel levels.

Roosevelt had envisioned in a March 31 press conference that the CCC boys would spend, at most, a week or two in the conditioning camps, and then be moved out quickly to the work camps. But the president, who insisted (added on to his famous sketch of CCC administration) that he personally approve of every single camp established, was finding it an impossible burden in the “Hundred Days” rush of other legislation. By early May men were being kept in army camps for more than two weeks and the backlog threatened the president’s goal of getting the men to work by July 1. For example, Pennsylvania had enrolled 7,150 men by May 13 and had sent on 4,645 into its work camps. But, one week later, they had enrolled and sent on to conditioning camps another 4,000 men, but the same 4,645 were the only ones at work in the woods.

Despite herculean efforts being made all over the country, the delays in moving the men into work camps were resulting in discipline problems at some of the conditioning camps. The biggest problem seems to have been keeping the men occupied in the abundant free time they had after they completed the modest amount of training and work they were given. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin on April 27 reported on some of the problems at Fort Meade. There was an acute shortage of recreational equipment at the base, which was creating “rising restlessness and homesickness” among the 3,200 enrollees, most of whom were from Philadelphia. The limited recreational equipment at the fort was claimed aggressively and protectively by army enlisted men there who resented the $30 a month pay scale of the CCC men, considerably more than privates were being paid. Consequently, the young men, with nothing to do after their light duties were completed, were taking to the roads, begging rides to towns, and creating annoyances. The recreational officer was described as “frantic,” and he issued calls for help from civic groups like the Playground Association of Philadelphia. When groups in Philadelphia responded with shipments of games and equipment for the camps, the same newspaper reported snidely on the “vacation”-like experiences the men were having.

The CCC administrators were always acutely sensitive to any such adverse publicity, and the burden was now on the civilian administrators of the ECW, both at the national and state levels, to hurry the men into work camps. A series of meetings in Washington to deal with the crisis resulted in Roosevelt’s and Fechner’s agreeing to streamline administrative procedures, and a torrent of camps began to be approved after mid-May.

The work to be done in Pennsylvania was approved by administrators in the Departments of Agriculture and Interior, working with the state personnel from the Department of Forests and Waters. But consultation with the army was necessary before a camp’s specific location was approved. The army had the experience of setting up camps with respect to safe water and sewage, ease of transportation, and suitability of terrain. Finally, the state Department of Health would have to give final approval to the sites as safely habitable.

The work camps in Pennsylvania were arranged into two large administrative districts: an Eastern District, No. 1, which included Pennsylvania east of the Susquehanna River and which was based in New Cumberland; and a Western District, No. 2, headquartered in Pittsburgh, which covered the camps in the rest of the state. In 1933 the Eastern District supervised only twenty-four work camps of the ninety-seven in the state, but by 1936 its area of jurisdiction had grown to control about 60 percent of all the camps in Pennsylvania.

Sometimes idiosyncratic factors had to be considered in locating camp sites. On June 2, Lewis Staley, head of the Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters, sent a heads-up note to Lieutenant Hendrix, the commanding officer at Camp S-51 at Pine Grove Furnace in Cumberland County, one of the first three camps to be set up on state lands in Pennsylvania. He alerted Hendrix to the presence of Girl Scout and tourist camps in his area and urged him to make sure no embarrassing incidents occurred.

Another potential problem in locating camps was not on the minds of the CCC people, but it did concern one of the field representatives of the state Bureau of Mental Health, Florence Hackenbush. She worried about the putative dangers presented by some of the indigenous inhabitants of the state. In what reads like some kind of preliminary draft of Deliverance, she alerted Persons to the fact that, with so many work camps being established in remote and isolated parts of Pennsylvania, the boys were bound to come in contact with the “deteriorated and degenerative feeble-minded families” living in those parts. She was particularly fearful that the “loose women” in some of these families might take advantage of the young men and abuse them. Ms. Hackenbush singled out Potter County as a particularly dangerous area.

Pennsylvania proved to be one of the more efficient states in setting up work camps because of two major advantages the state enjoyed. First of all, the state was somewhat unusual for an eastern state in that it was home to the half-million acre Allegheny National Forest, established in 1921. The first fifty camps set up in the country were in national forests. These lands were directly under the supervision of the U.S. Forestry Service and locating camps there did not require as much cooperation with state authorities. Moreover, the service had developed a comprehensive plan of forestry work projects that were just waiting for an influx of manpower such as the CCC was about to provide.

Thus the first camp established in Pennsylvania was in the Allegheny National Forest near Marienville, Camp ANF-1, Company #318. Both camps and companies received numerical designations. At the conditioning camps the army had organized the men into companies of two hundred each. Third Corps companies would be numbered 301, 302, and so on, until the numbers ran out, and then there would be companies numbering from 1301 or 2301. Confusing matters somewhat was the CCC practice of giving its own numbers to the work camps in the states. In Pennsylvania, for example, State Forest Camp 119 (S-119) would receive Company #373 in 1933, but in 1936, Company #5471 from the southern Fourth Corps was posted there. In 1937 another Third Corps company, #303-C, a Colored company, relieved Company #5471 and remained there until the camp closed in 1941.

Camp ANF-1 was in business by April 24, 1933, making it the second CCC camp in the country after Camp Roosevelt in Virginia, which had opened a week earlier. Camp ANF-1 later became a Signal Corps outpost for communicating with other area camps. It proved to be of great use during the 1936 floods in Pennsylvania. The men sent to ANF-1 had been organized by the army at Fort Monroe, Virginia. The next three camps established were also in the national forest. These companies, also organized at Fort Monroe, were credited with the same starting date of April 24: Company #319 at ANF-2, near Heart’s Content; Company #320 at ANF-3, near Kinzua and Dunkle Corner; and Company #321-C at ANF-5, outside Kinzua on Sugar Run. The latter was the first Colored camp in Pennsylvania.

The second important advantage for Pennsylvania in these early days was its well-organized Department of Forests and Waters, created by Governor Pinchot in 1923 and headed in 1933 by one of his protégés, Lewis Staley, a graduate of the Mont Alto Forestry School. Staley was responsible for the almost two million publicly owned acres in the state, and his department had plenty of work planned, much of which had been put off by the budget cuts caused by the Depression. While the work done by the CCC on these state-owned lands had to be approved by the federal agencies, the actual work in the state camps was directly supervised by Staley’s Forests and Waters personnel.

Staley got the CCC off to a running start. He attended a meeting in Washington on April 6, called by Forester Robert Y. Stuart (Staley’s predecessor as head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Forests and Waters) to begin coordinating work plans between the federal and state foresters and by the next day had formally sent on 54 work projects to Fechner’s office for approval. These were approved by April 21, by which time Staley had a few dozen more in the pipeline. By June 2 Fechner had approved a total of 97 work projects for Pennsylvania.
< insert figure 6—Staley—near here>

Only California had more camps—171—and no other eastern state came close to Pennsylvania’s 97. Virginia had 48 and New York had 32, for example. Nine of the camps, about 11 percent of the total, were assigned to Colored companies, which was more than double the percentage of the African-American population of the state. This was a relatively good record considering that, because of southern resistance, the entire CCC class that summer was only about 5 percent black. Seven camps for 1,400 veterans, who had been enrolled a bit later than the Juniors, were approved by the Advisory Council on June 30, and the men assigned to these camps were in camp by mid-July.

By the end of July 1933, then, there were eighty-nine CCC work camps established on state lands in Pennsylvania, seven in the Allegheny National Forest, and one at Gettysburg Military Park. The conservation work in the Allegheny National Forest was under the supervision of the U.S. Forestry Service, the work at Gettysburg was under the National Park Service (NPS) and the work in the state forests was run by the Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters. Despite this frenetic pace of activity by Staley and his department in organizing work projects, the feeling in Washington in early May was that some of the Pennsylvania enrollees, like men from other eastern states, were going to have to be sent out west. There were more national forest and national park lands in the West that could more readily absorb the labor of eastern men than could their home states. A small cadre of 337 Pennsylvania men had been sent to Pocatello, Idaho, on May 8 and more were expected to follow.

It is impossible to be precise on the numbers of Pennsylvanians sent west in 1933 because except for Pennsylvania Company #1301, which was sent to Greys River, Wyoming, most of the men who were sent out of state in this early period were distributed, in groups of about twenty, to various companies in camps in Idaho and Wyoming. After the administrative logjam in Washington was broken in mid-May, Staley was able to get enough camp sites approved to occupy the rest of Pennsylvania’s enrollment quota. No more Pennsylvania men had to be sent west after May 24. On the president’s target date of July 1, the vast majority of the CCC men recruited in Pennsylvania were at work in camps operating in their home state.

The level of activity involved in setting up all these camps in Pennsylvania in May and June 1933 is difficult to imagine and perhaps accounts for the relative scarcity of records on this initial period, especially state records in the Pennsylvania State Archives. Pinchot reported Staley as “swamped” with work, with twenty-six work camps established on a single day, May 30. Staley’s deputy, John W. Keller, reflecting later on those feverish weeks, wondered “what we did with our time” before the ECW program began.

Director Fechner complimented Governor Pinchot on Pennsylvania’s record, citing it as “one of the very best of our states in cooperating.” He recognized the achievement of the Keystone State in setting up enough camps to occupy almost the entirety of the state’s enrollment quota and pressed Pinchot, unsuccessfully, to find camps to absorb some of the surplus men from nearby states.

In Philadelphia, far from any CCC camp, there was also frenetic activity in support of the CCC. The program’s immediate impact on local business was seen in the rush orders for tents and clothing that the quartermaster general ordered that first spring. From May 15 to June 8 workers at the army’s Quartermaster Corps, in the rush to meet the urgent CCC demand for equipment, were kept busy working seven days a week, and women were reportedly working illegal night shifts. The army had doubled the workforce and was still straining to fill orders for 425,000 coats and 200,000 pairs of trousers. Some of the work involved altering sizes of army surplus gear to fit the smaller, often malnourished enrollees. In addition, the workers were producing seventy-five tents a day.

Governor Pinchot expressed concern that widespread violations of Pennsylvania’s factory laws were occurring. At first he was told that state laws did not apply on the federal properties, but after the first rush of orders had been filled, the army assured him that it was respecting all relevant standards and was cooperating with the state factory inspectors. By mid-June the workers filling army orders were back to eight-hour days, forty-four-hour weeks, and mutually satisfactory arrangements had been negotiated with private subcontractors in the city. Another violation of fair labor practices occurred when a private company in Delaware, paying substandard wages, provided the Quartermaster Depot in Philadelphia with 15,000 cots. This episode resulted in Fechner asserting his authority over all CCC purchases of over $2,500.

Once the work projects and sites were established and the men equipped and housed in the work camps, there was a whole new set of shake-out problems. Poorly chosen sites, faulty tents, and shortages of proper clothing and tools plagued the early camps. The site chosen for Camp S-101 near Ridgway was full of boulders and tree stumps that had to be cleared before the tents could be erected. Clarence J. McMaster was among the first group of men to arrive at the camp. He remembered clearing the woods for the tent site, bathing in the Clarion River, and using a latrine ditch behind the tents. The original tent site in the picnic area at Promised Land State Park had to be moved to the Deerfield area ten days later, and it was not until June 5 that the men were ready to do forestry work. Philadelphia boys assigned to Camp S-51 at Pine Grove Furnace lived in railroad cars for a few days and had to walk two miles every day to the camp site until they had it prepared for tents. Occasionally camp sites were placed where water supplies soon proved inadequate. At the early Heart’s Content camp in the Allegheny National Forest, the men had to dig a 120-foot-deep well when the stream in camp could not supply the needed amount of water.

Delays in getting the White House to authorize the purchase of tools for the earliest Pennsylvania camps were among the most important factors leading to Roosevelt’s Executive Order of May 12, streamlining procedures and breaking the logjam of early May. Three camps in Somerset County had no adequate tools for the first three months, and the men busied themselves in cleaning up roadside trash to minimize the dangers of fires.

The question of trucks was particularly crucial. They were essential in the conservation work because they brought supplies to camp and transported the men and equipment to the work sites. Governor Pinchot did what he could to supplement the number of ECW trucks out of state supplies, but Fechner pleaded with him for more. By midsummer the ECW had bought or rented eight hundred trucks for the ninety-seven Pennsylvania camps.

One little wrinkle was added to camp organization on July 21 when the Advisory Council approved a Forestry Service proposal for “side-camps,” established and supervised by the technical services outside army jurisdiction. Some of the conservation work, particularly clearing fire lanes, began taking the men farther and farther away from base camp, necessitating longer transportation time and thus less work time. The army had resisted this new arrangement but finally agreed to allow a maximum of twenty workers to be detached to side-camps in the field.

Camp Supervisors

Camp supervision reflected the general overlapping of administration for which the CCC was notorious. Supervising the two hundred enrollees, usually including about a dozen LEMs, were the military men and the technical people. A typical camp in the organizational set-up period in 1933 had a commanding officer (CO), usually a captain from the regular army, assisted by two subalterns and several army enlisted men. Third Corps army regulations required at least one officer to reside in camp. Others could reside outside the camp if they received permission and if “the interest of the government and the CCC will not suffer.”

Regular army officers were mostly replaced by men from the huge pool of 100,000 reserve officers beginning in late 1933. Occasionally, in a small number of camps, officers from the other armed services would serve as COs or as assistants. In some camps there would also be a resident army surgeon or an army chaplain. Later in the decade the army rotated its officers every six months or so to make the experience of camp command available to as many as possible and to broaden officers’ experiences.

Questions of camp discipline were delicate matters for COs. They lacked the firm and formal authority over the men that the Uniform Code of Military Justice would have provided them for army recruits. As there were no military police (MPs) in camps, officers were forced to rely primarily on their “command” abilities, and the army came to appreciate the value of this CCC experience for its officers. Mild penalties of extra duty, small fines, and confinement to camp on weekends could be administered. The ultimate punishment could be dismissal from camp with a dishonorable discharge. By November the army had set up a system of hearings and appeals for men about to be dismissed.

Somewhat paralleling the army CO in authority was the camp superintendent, usually a forester appointed by the Department of Forests and Waters and approved by the U.S. Forestry Service or the National Park Service. He was in charge of the work projects and had supervisory authority over the men when they left camp to work in the field, leaving behind about twenty men under the CO’s jurisdiction for camp and kitchen duty.

The general lines of responsibility between the army and the technical supervisors were defined in broad terms, but disputes could arise in the interstices. For example, disagreements occasionally arose on questions of awarding ratings and extra pay to certain enrollees or on which ones would be allowed to re-enlist. Relations between supervisors could become quite formalized. In the Camp S-107 records at Michaux State Forest there is extensive correspondence between the CO and the superintendent on such issues as truck availability, charges for meals taken in camp, and the rating of enrollees. The CO even admonished the superintendent for allowing his personnel to enter army offices without permission.

Because the army had general responsibility for the health and safety of the men, disagreements could arise on whether a certain work project was appropriate or whether the weather was suitable. If weather forced a cancellation of a work day, it was usually made up on Saturday, a day partially reserved for camp maintenance, and that could cause friction. When emergencies arose, such as fires or floods, the CO could assume total authority over the men and disrupt normal work routines. There were many issues that could not be resolved in written regulations and had to be worked out on the ground. But usually the officers and supervisors cooperated amicably. They lived together and ate together and had a common interest in keeping camp operations running as smoothly as possible.

The superintendent was variously assisted by two foresters, eight foremen, a blacksmith, and an engineer, as well as by the presumably helpful LEMs. These work supervisors, unlike the army men, were not required to live in camp, but many did and had their own separate quarters. They were expected to pay nominal fees for meals taken in camp. Salaries for these positions ranged over scales but at Promised Land State Park, Camp S-139, in 1933, the superintendent was paid $148 a month, the engineer $136, the blacksmith $96, and the eight foremen $102 each. By 1936, the superintendent at this camp was being paid $216 a month, the six foremen were each receiving between $100 and $166 a month, the engineer was paid $166, the blacksmith $110, and a mechanic $120.

There was no civil service protection for most of these skilled people and the forestry services had no reserve force in readiness as the army did. Therefore, these positions had to be filled with local workers, and political influence often affected their appointment. An early inspection by Fechner’s office reported that Camp S-108, Big Pond, near Shippensburg, was badly run, mostly due to several frequently drunk foremen who had been appointed on the recommendation of the local Democratic congressman. In contrast, at the very start-up of the program, Senator Guffey’s sister, Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, who sat on the Democratic National Committee, was receiving complaints from her people in Pennsylvania that they were being shut out of these jobs by state and local Republicans. She reminded President Roosevelt how important those jobs would be in building up the party base in the state.

A similar complaint was directed at Governor Pinchot three weeks later. Pinchot received an angry letter from a Democratic congressman from the Stroudsburg area about the influence that the Pike County relief boards, dominated by Republicans, were having on the appointment of foresters to the camps. The congressman charged that Staley was working closely with relief board officials to make sure that only Republicans got those jobs. Pinchot looked into it and found that there had actually been an equal number of Democratic and Republican foremen appointed in Pike and in adjacent Monroe County. This, however, would not be the last time that Staley would be accused of heavy-handed politics in CCC matters. After he went to work for the U.S. Forestry Service in 1935, Senator Guffey tried to get him fired, claiming that Staley had used his people to oppose Democrats in the elections of 1934 while he was head of the Department of Forests and Waters. On the other hand, after the Democrats elected Governor Earle in 1934, it was the turn of Republican congressmen to complain about being shut out of CCC appointments.

Political influence rarely affected the selection of enrollees. Nor was there any politics involved in the skilled personnel who worked for the Departments of Agriculture (U.S. Forestry Service and the Soil Conservation Service) or Interior (National Park Service). But when these so-called technical people needed other skilled or experienced workers, such as blacksmiths, mechanics, or foremen, local congressmen usually recommended appointees from lists of locally qualified men drawn up by the services. These lists were known as “Friant lists,” named after Julian N. Friant, an official in the Department of Agriculture who initiated the system. Superintendents supposedly had the right to reject outright incompetents, but there were many complaints from the foresters that they had been pressured to hire unqualified people. In Pennsylvania, the Department of Forests and Waters needed permission from Washington to fire incompetent foremen.

A critical report on this matter of political influences on the CCC was published by the Forestry News Digest in March 1936 and was picked up by the New York Herald-Tribune. The resultant publicity was embarrassing to Fechner’s office. The political side of the CCC was a murky area, one that cannot be investigated with any precision, although a study done for the American Council on Education in 1942 claimed that 60 percent of the skilled positions in CCC camps were filled by improper political influence.

Camp Life in the First Year

For the enrollees, life in the work camps continued some of the patterns they had experienced in the army conditioning camps. The young men had gotten acquainted with their Company comrades in the army camps, but now they began to learn the ropes of life in their very different work camps in the woods. City boys were treated to their first sights of bear, deer, porcupines, groundhogs, and beaver, and lectures on rattlesnakes were a vital part of their initiation into a forest environment. Tony Cellini from South Philadelphia was not untypical of city boys. Before his time in the CCC, he had known of two kinds of trees—Christmas trees and all the others.

Some of the daily routine was similar to the regimen they had adjusted to in the conditioning camps. Reveille was usually bugled at 6:00, followed by a flag-raising ceremony and breakfast. After making their beds with an army-style tightness that could bounce a quarter upon inspection, they were trucked out to the work sites around 8:00. They worked till noon, ate lunch in the field—sometimes a hot meal, but usually sandwiches—and then worked until 4:00 or so, depending on travel time. Back in camp, there would be some free time to clean up and relax before the flag-lowering ceremony and dinner at 5:30, in dress uniform. Evenings were spent in classes, recreation, watching an occasional movie, or on a trip to town if that was feasible. Taps were blown at 10:00 for lights-out and a bed check made before 11:00.

Weekends and holidays were work-free, unless bad weather had prevented work during the week. On Sundays, church services were offered to those who wanted to participate. It was the rare work camp that had a resident chaplain, but between the army’s full- and part-time itinerant chaplains and the community-based clergymen, the men had ample opportunity to attend services at camp or in town.

The Quartermaster Department of the army was not initially prepared for the prodigious appetites of the young men, previously undernourished and now ravenous after hard labor in the woods. One camp inspection report on S-71 in Centre County reported the menu for a typical and randomly picked day, October 16, 1934. For breakfast, the men had bacon and egg omelets, fried potatoes, prunes, cereals, coffee, milk, and bread and butter. Lunch brought to the men in the field that day consisted of beef stew, kidney beans, potatoes, bread and butter, and coffee and milk. In case anyone was still hungry for dinner, the menu was macaroni and cheese, creamed green beans, lettuce, tomatoes, bread and butter, hot chocolate, sugar, evaporated milk, and chocolate pudding. Of course the camp PX was open for late evening snacks as well.

In most work camps in Pennsylvania in the first six months in 1933 the enrollees lived in army tents. These were usually of World War I vintage with wooden floors, and most of them were designed to sleep six men with a portable heating stove inside. They were easily set up, depending on the site chosen. One camp reportedly completed the job in one hour! In contrast, at the early camp at Hillsgrove, two hundred men from Philadelphia arrived at “camp” to find that there would be no shelter until they had cut down trees to make a path for the trucks to deliver the tents. It was such a rainy week that they even had to buy dry wood from local farmers to cook with, but Happy Days assured readers that “the men sang” through it all.

Some of the tent canvas had deteriorated in storage, and leaky roofs resulted in some unpleasant nights in the mountains of Pennsylvania for recruits, even in the comparatively mild early summer. The weather had been a concern when the program began, with Fechner worrying in May that work camps in the northern states might have to be moved south when the hard weather came. Some of that hard weather hit Pennsylvania earlier than expected, in late August. A terrible storm swept through the state, devastating nine of the tent camp sites and drowning one enrollee, George Kester of Company #383, at Camp S-95, La Porte.

CCC camps were usually located in rustic and isolated settings. A student of the CCC educational program in 1934 provided a picturesque description of his experiences in looking for camps that still rings true today for people seeking old camp sites: “These little villages show on no map that can be purchased in a city shop. . . . I have ridden behind an Army chauffeur with a Corps Area map as his guide, and seen him hunt his camp for an hour. Only by questioning at country filling stations, by nosing up dirt roads, by guessing hazardly at rude forks can one stumble at last upon the more elusive of them.”

Few camp buildings of the CCC era remain in Pennsylvania today. The best preserved camp complex is that of S-70 in the Michaux State Forest, leased and admirably maintained since the 1940s by Methodist church groups. Parker Dam State Park has a well-preserved barracks building, which houses a CCC museum. Promised Land State Park has a few utility buildings and an officers’ quarters that now houses an attractive display of CCC artifacts and memorabilia. Laurel Hill State Park claims to have more original CCC camp buildings than any other state park, including some barracks.

But at most of the CCC camp sites today, curious or pious pilgrims looking for places where CCC men, sometimes their ancestors, lived, worked, and gamboled with youthful energy beyond imagining, will find themselves driving on poorly marked gravel roads, traipsing through dark forests, overgrown and snake infested, or gazing across open meadows now devoted to playground equipment. Sadly, the site of Camp Joyce Kilmer, S-148, in Union County, now serves as a junk yard for the State Forestry Department.

The camp site of S-51 near Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Cumberland County is more typical. It sits off the road on Michaux State Forest land. Intrepid visitors hiking through tangled underbrush will need a vivid imagination to recreate the camp life of the hundreds of young men who spent formative months of their lives there. One can still see a few macadam foundations of buildings off to the side of a trail, and the more adventurous can hike their way upstream to a dam and sluice channel built by the men. A small pond that served as a swimming hole does not look very inviting today, but the inspired tourist might be able to close his or her eyes and conjure up ghostly images of young men splashing and frolicking after a hard day’s work. Perhaps the most poignant relic of the CCC presence at Pine Grove Furnace is an intricately designed water fountain, now decrepit and unused, that clearly was a work of skill and pride.

The creation of the CCC and then the arrival of CCC camps were, with very few exceptions, warmly welcomed by Pennsylvania communities nearby. Indeed, the members of some communities were not content with only one camp in their vicinity but pleaded with Pinchot to set up more and complained when camps were shut down. The camps meant increased business for local contractors and merchants because the policy of the CCC was to make purchases in local areas whenever possible. These purchases of food, gasoline, and hardware profited local depressed economies, and even some of the $5 a month available to the two hundred men in camp to spend on weekends in town was appreciated. Communities usually welcomed the arrival of CCC men, contributing recreation equipment, arranging sports competition with own local teams, and hosting weekend dances. There was very little hostility, let alone violence, toward camps in the neighborhood, although the recent laying off of sixty employees in the Clearfield State Forest produced some resentment when men at the CCC camp located there seemed to be doing some of their old work.

Meanwhile, the men were amusing themselves in camp after work hours. One camp crowned as bread-eating champion “Fats” De Carlo of Uniontown, who ate an impressive twenty-three slices in one sitting. Another camp created a kind of fraternity, the “Order of the Hairy Lip,” open only to those whose mustaches were visible at ten yards. Other camps organized minstrel shows in blackface, still a popular entertainment in those years. Company #1322 at North Bend started a vegetable garden with seeds provided by local relief organizations. They planted a variety of vegetables, but no “spuds” (KP peeling duty being one of the more unpleasant aspects of camp life).

An important activity, almost universal in the camps, was the publication of some kind of camp newspaper, about five thousand of which eventually appeared for runs of various length. The typical paper was several pages of mimeographed reports on camp life, editorial essays, poetry, and sometimes advertising. Many of them tried to come up with snappy titles, such as “The Cammal’s Hump,” put out by Company #365, S-124, at Cammal. Happy Days, the unofficial national newspaper of CCC activities, encouraged these efforts, gave them some professional advice, and occasionally ran contests for the best papers. An early Pennsylvania paper, “The Barracks,” put out by Company #1301, Camp SP-3 at Broughton, was judged the best paper in the Third Corps and tied for the best in the country in 1934.

These camp newspapers provide interesting information about camp activities and personnel and are an invaluable source for anyone looking for information about individual camps or relatives or friends who served in the camps. Unfortunately, extant copies of CCC camp newspapers exist only in scattered sites—at some State Park offices, in Archival files with CCC material, in private hands. The most extensive collection, garnered from many sources, including the Library of Congress, is in the hands of the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago in microform. Unfortunately, the fees charged by this organization make it practically inaccessible to most researchers.

Deer hunting season that first year, and in subsequent years, presented special problems. In some of the camps the men were ordered to remain inside when the fireworks began on the first day. John W. Graham, who was stationed at a camp in the Allegheny National Forest, remembered it as sounding like the Battle of Gettysburg. Lewis Staley, in the absence of instructions from Washington, recommended that COs purchase plenty of red cloth to mark their men in the woods, put up perimeter signs around work crews, and surround their camps with chest-high chicken wire as legal protection against roving hunters. One enterprising commanding officer reportedly rented out to hunters, at $3 a night, the bunks of men who went home for weekends!

Because the men’s work day was set at eight hours, including transportation to and from the job sites (unlike the technical supervisors from Interior or Agriculture whose work day did not include transit time), camp supervisors began to raise concerns very early on about how to occupy the men for the rest of the day. General Paul Malone was concerned that, with an effective work day of six hours, there would be too much leisure time for “active young men.” He intended to fill that time with “useful pursuits” and had been working with Pinchot and Staley from an early date in getting forestry educational materials into the camps—pamphlets, film strips, and a few motion pictures.

Commanders and supervisors in the camps did what they could to fill up the men’s free time, but in the summer months, at least, outdoor recreation was usually their first choice. With the approach of fall and fewer hours of daylight, the scattered calls for a more formal camp education program received a more serious hearing, and the president authorized such a program in December 1933.

The educational program of the CCC always had the quality of an afterthought about it and was not clearly conceived nor well structured. Many CCC supervisors thought that the on-the-job training the men received was sufficient, but other administrators, like Frank Persons, were concerned with providing more useful and employable skills than forestry work for men who would be returning to city lives. The program that emerged in 1934 offered voluntary, after-work instruction in a variety of academic and vocational subjects, enabling a certain number of motivated and ambitious men to acquire useful skills and even career paths, but it left many others without any meaningful instruction.

Clarence C. Marsh was appointed by the Interior Department’s Office of Education to be director of CCC education in early 1934. Marsh served only about a year in this position before he resigned out of frustration caused by the apathy, and even outright hostility, to the program that he received from both Fechner and the army. In Pennsylvania, Marsh selected two prominent educators, James Rule of Harrisburg, and M. S. McDowell of State College, to make the appointments of educational advisers for each of the camps.

Marsh sent along to Louis Howe, the president’s closest political adviser, the first list of adviser appointees, mostly unemployed teachers, together with the names of those who had recommended them. Howe was very anxious lest these appointments might be influenced by partisan (read: Republican) politics. Responding to a complaint by Democratic Congressman Mees of Pennsyvania, Howe sent the list of educational advisers appointed to Pennsylvania camps, each adviser on a salary of $2,000 a year, to Democratic officials throughout the state, asking them to scrutinize it for evidence of adverse political influence in the appointments. Political patronage did not exactly control these appointments, but it was a picture in chiaroscuro style.

The educational program got off to an uneven and shaky start. Although some camps were able to expand course offerings from the solid base they had established on their own that first summer, others lagged behind. A camp inspection of S-139 at Promised Land State Park reported that, as late as June 1934, no educational adviser had yet arrived and no formal classes were offered at night, just a few films.

The educational advisers were under the supervision of the commanding army officers once they were in camp, one of the many administrative confusions in the CCC organization. And because the educational program in the camps was thereby under the army’s jurisdiction, the attitude of camp commanders was crucial. One educational adviser was introduced to the men by the CO with a somewhat less than enthusiastic endorsement: “Boys, the Government has decided to give you an educational program. You don’t have to take it unless you want it, and I don’t know that it will amount to anything. But here’s Mr. Smith who will have charge of it, and he can talk to you.”

Over the years an amazing variety of subjects taught after hours in the CCC camps evolved, and a popular image emerged of young Abe Lincolns studying into the nights after long hard days of log splitting. Lessons taught covered almost every conceivable academic topic as well as arts and crafts and highly technical subjects like auto mechanics or metal working. The courses taught were as varied as camp personnel felt qualified to offer, and instructors included not just the educational adviser but also the military, technical personnel from Interior or Agriculture, and even enrollees themselves. By 1938, for example, there were 603 different subjects being taught in camps. Of the 23,168 people offering this instruction, only 1,537 were the educational advisers. Army personnel giving classes numbered 3,033, 9,895 were technical people, 688 local citizens volunteered their services, and 5,767 of the camp instructors were the enrollees themselves!

Another Six Months

By October 1933, as the initial first six-month enlistment period drew to a close, the conservation work done by the men had made an impressive start, and the CCC penchant for collecting and reporting mind-numbing statistics on its work projects had begun. In Pennsylvania, some two million gooseberry and currant bushes, the most important hosts for the fungus that causes white pine blister rust, had been uprooted and burned; six new steel fire observation towers, each 80 feet high and linked by telephone, had been erected; some 850 miles of forest roads and 900 miles of trails had been built or improved; and 80 miles of telephone wires strung up.

With the CCC off to such an impressive start and Pennsylvania’s experiences being replicated, more or less, throughout the country, Roosevelt decided to extend the program for an additional six months and issued an Executive Order to that effect on August 19. Director Fechner was given the go-ahead to build more permanent structures for winter quarters, and he told Howe that he had decided that wooden structures would make the cheapest and most suitable type of buildings.
That fall the army quartermaster oversaw the letting out of contracts for lumber and building materials for the construction of more substantial living quarters for 1,443 camps across the country, a task that was described as the biggest housing project in history. Local contractors, using teams of about thirty workers, were hired by the Corps headquarters, usually at union wage levels. The design of buildings and camp sites varied considerably from camp to camp as did the number of buildings. Fechner reported an average of nineteen buildings per camp in 1936, with construction costs usually at $20,000 per camp.

Politics, of course, played a role in these building contracts. The ECW assistant director, James McEntee, wrote a contractor in Camp Hill, advising him to contact local Democratic Party officials for information on how best to obtain this work. Preference was also given to union contractors. McEntee, who, like Fechner, had come from the trade union movement, defended this practice by citing the need for speed and reliability in letting out these contracts, and working through local building councils was the method usually adopted. By Thanksgiving, most Pennsylvania men were in the newly constructed barracks.

By 1936 the CCC had worked out a system of precut supplies of wood for prefabricated and standardized buildings, to be laid out in more or less standardized U-shaped pattern of barracks, supervisors’ quarters, mess hall, recreation hall, bathhouses, and utility buildings. This system made it easier to pack up and move camps when work projects were completed, although the resulting uniformity lacked the charming individuality of the earliest camps.

Although most of the early CCC buildings were built by local skilled contractors, the CCC men themselves, of course, built many buildings, such as mess halls, officers’ quarters, recreational buildings, and storage sheds. Though few CCC men had skilled backgrounds, with supervision and direction they were capable of impressive construction work. The handsome and sturdy tourist cabins still in use at many state parks in Pennsylvania are clear evidence of this. But those kinds of buildings were intended to be permanent and were labor-intensive projects, unlike most camp buildings, which were always thought of as temporary.

The extension of the CCC for another six-month term not only resulted in extensive building projects but also required that the process of approving new work projects and camp sites had to start up again. Fechner warned Pinchot that winter weather might require shutting down some of the work in Pennsylvania unless he could get his forestry people to obtain speedy approval for new projects for the next six months. He also recommended that Pinchot contact Pennsylvania congressmen, asking them to back projects in which they had an interest. As early as August 28 Pinchot was able to reply that Pennsylvania had submitted seventy-one work proposals, with another seventeen on the way.

Once new work projects had been lined up and the number of work camps established, the state selecting apparatus had to be cranked up again with an eye toward filling October quotas. This was a bit more complicated now, because not only would recruits have to be enrolled to replace the men who had not completed, for one reason or other, their six-month tours, but rough estimates had to be made of how many of the men in camp would re-enlist, as they were allowed to, for another six-month term. Approximately 175,000 of the original class eventually decided to re-enlist, and the enrollment in October was finalized at 125,000 replacements. When many camps subsequently became a little light, it was decided to have an intermediate enrollment in January 1934 of another 25,000 recruits. Thereafter enrollments would take place four times a year.

Person’s office at the Labor Department assigned Pennsylvania a quota for what was now called the second enrollment period in October 1933. The number of men in Pennsylvania camps, which had hovered around 18,000 that first summer, increased to 20,400 by January 1934. By now Eric Biddle, executive director of SERB, had turned over the CCC selection responsibility to his assistant field director, J. Fred Kurtz, who began meting out quotas to the local Emergency Relief Boards throughout the state and issuing policy guidelines as well. When the October enrollment was completed, Pennsylvania had its entire quota of men in its own camps, the men who had been sent west in the first enrollment period having been recalled.

Most of the camps were continued from the first period and a few were brand new. Of the total 104 Pennsylvania camps in the second enrollment period, 85 were on state forest lands, 6 on state game lands, 7 in the Allegheny National Forest, 2 at Gettysburg, 1 on state National Guard lands, 2 in state parks, and 1 in the city park in Reading. Because Pennsylvania could provide work, four companies of men from the Second Corps (New York, New Jersey, and Delaware) who had gone west in the first period were now moved back east and occupied new camps in eastern Pennsylvania for the next six months, after which those camps were filled with Pennsylvania companies.

In the midst of all this activity surrounding the extension of the CCC, Governor Pinchot received the tragic news of Forester Stuart’s death. Stuart had apparently committed suicide, falling from a seventh-floor window in an office adjacent to his own in the Department of Agriculture building in Washington on October 23. Stuart, a former protégé and friend, had headed the Department of Forests and Waters during Pinchot’s first term as governor and had moved on to become head of the U.S. Forestry Service in 1928. He had experienced a nervous breakdown in early 1932 but had recovered to become one of the key men involved in the planning and implementation of the CCC.

William Terry, a messenger for the Forest Service, was approaching the building shortly after 8:00 A.M. when he saw Stuart crash onto a car parked below the window. The window had a low sill, and the initial speculation was that Stuart might have experienced vertigo and fallen out. There was puzzlement, however, over why he was in that particular office. The window in his own office had a fire escape, which would have obstructed jumping, but the window from which he fell provided a clear fall. He left behind no suicide note, but he had been complaining of ill health and nervous fatigue due to overwork.

Pinchot was devastated by the news and rushed off a telegram of condolence to Stuart’s wife. In addition to his widow, Stuart left behind two young daughters. His successor at the Forestry Service was J. Fred Wilcox, who served until his own death in 1938.

The new year of 1934 found Pennsylvania’s CCC men hunkered down in permanent buildings with plenty of cut wood to keep the barracks warm during long winter nights and more food than most of them had ever had in their lives. They also had been supplied with winter clothing and bedding through another impressive effort by the army quartermaster. The men were given paid leaves on Thanksgiving and Christmas when they could return home or simply relax and enjoy the special holiday meals in camp—for many of them the first time they had tasted turkey.

Fechner worried that heavy snows in the mountains of Pennsylvania might cut off and isolate some of the camps, but he had to turn down Staley’s request for fifty-eight snowplows for lack of funds. The governor’s office assured Fechner that the state Highway Department would do its best to keep the roads around the camps clear and passable. The first heavy snow fell in early November, and Camp S-140 in Lackawanna County, for one, was ill-equipped for such weather. Finding conditions intolerable, twenty-six boys left camp. Persons assured Eric Biddle that emergency supplies of stoves and bedding were being rushed to the camp and, if the AWOLs returned soon, their offense would be overlooked.

Robert Ward, who was spending his first months at Camp S-91 at Watrous that winter, remembers the weather as being particularly severe. When temperatures dropped to forty degrees below zero, the men objected to being transported to work sites in trucks with only light canvas protection. A few dozen of them went on strike, but most changed their minds when the camp commander threatened to discharge them.

Of course, occasional complaints arose from the men, usually about food or dictatorial COs. But “well begun is half done” goes the old saw. The CCC c