Many of us probably have a hazy intuition that the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps did a lot of good work. Like, in state parks. And that’s about it.
Jerry Apps’ entertaining new book, The Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin: Nature’s Army at Work (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), makes it clear just how much the state owes the workers of the CCC.
Apps tells us what the CCC accomplished from its 90 camps across the state, which housed and provided jobs primarily to unmarried, unemployed men. Even better, he helps us get to know some of its members.
There are stories of people like Jim Mitchell, who ran away from his Kenosha home when he was 17, fearing he was a burden. “You went on the road and you exchanged one misery for another. You were always filthy and constantly hungry,” he recalled. “Nothing was happening.”
And he meant it. In 1933, nearly a quarter of the civilian labor force was unemployed.
Prohibition had already crippled the brewing industry, and the Great Depression hit the state’s industrial southeast especially hard. “To add to the woes of the economic collapse,” the author notes, “a severe drought in the Midwest and Southwest destroyed crops and uprooted people,” leading to erosion both of society and soil. In the state’s north, logging practices has devastated the forests.
To feed the hungry, house the homeless, stimulate the economy and address the ecological crisis, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps. Apps observes that it was not greeted with universal acclaim.
“Another top-down government program, they said. A handout of taxpayer money to the poor, they said,” he writes. That was all absolutely true.
Today, the CCC today is widely praised as an unqualified success. We take it as part of the American tradition of can-do bootstrapping, even if we’re not sure what the program did.
Even history buffs may be surprised to learn the scale of CCC operations in Wisconsin. Four rail lines served the Sparta headquarters, where 14 freight cars of supplies were emptied daily, to feed 20,000 men in 90 active camps. Some 200 men per camp, 40 per bunkhouse, they planted trees, created windbreaks, instituted contour plowing, dug ditches, cut and improved trails and built park buildings.
Recruits were paid $30 a month, $25 of which had to be sent home. “Young men learned how to work, gained employment skills, and some even learned to read and write,” writes Apps. At Camp Devil’s Lake they even worked an on-site quarry. But lest we elevate the CCC to American myth, Apps reminds us of a darker side.
In the Devil’s Lake night, “Loneliness and homesickness hung over our wooded area like a light fog,” wrote one recruit, “blanketing the lowlands of our minds.”
This is a masterful account, clearly written, at turns funny, dramatic and always informative. The Civilian Conservation Corps in Wisconsin: Nature’s Army at Work includes black-and-white photos, index and extensive footnotes.
Jerry Apps will speak on May 13 at 6:30 p.m. at the Verona Public Library.
