The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was created on March 31, 1933, in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first month in office. The CCC was an interdepartmental work and relief program that sent young, unemployed men from the cities to work on conservation projects in rural areas at a dollar a day. The CCC is credited with constructing many buildings and trails in state and national parks still treasured today, and other work related to land conservation, etc.

The Labor Department's role was to recruit participants into the program. To do this, the employment service was hastily beefed up and mobilized. Within a week there was organized within it a National Re-Employment Service to handle recruitment. The first enrollee entered the CCC on April 7, 1933, just 37 days after President Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. In a short time there were 250,000 young enrollees working in CCC camps all around the country. Enrollment peaked in September 1935 at about 502,000. One of the most successful and well-received New Deal programs, by the time the CCC disbanded in 1942 several million young men had participated.

In Roosevelt's second fireside chat on May 7, 1933, he spoke about the CCC in a radio address to the American people:

"First, we are giving opportunity of employment to one-quarter of a million of the unemployed, especially the young men who have dependents, to go into the forestry and flood prevention work. This is a big task because it means feeding, clothing and caring for nearly twice as many men as we have in the regular army itself. In creating this civilian conservation corps we are killing two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and second, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress."

In addition to construction work in national parks, other CCC projects included installation of telephone and power lines, construction of logging and fire roads, fence construction, erosion control, tree planting, and even beekeeping, archeological excavation, and furniture manufacture. The CCC also provided the first truly organized wildland firefighting crews for government agencies such as the United States Forest Service.

CCC enrollees worked 40 hours a week and were paid $30 a month, with the requirement that $25 of that be sent home to the enrollee's family. Initially, the CCC was limited to young men age 18 to 25 who were on relief. Two exceptions to the age limits were veterans, who had a special CCC program and their own camps, and older people with needed skills, hired by the CCC to supervise the young men on the job. These older CCC members were known as "LEMs", for Local Experienced Men. In 1937, Congress changed the age limits to 17 to 23 years old, and dropped the requirement that enrollees be on relief. Members enrolled for six months, with the option of enrolling for another six months. The CCC was organized into camps around the nation, with the first camp in George Washington National Forest in Virginia. Eventually over 4,000 camps would be established.

It stands to reason that we need something like this to provide a framework to help the people of the Gulf to rebuild their communities, giving them something concrete and positive to do in the process -- but, of course, it's not going to happen, not under this administration. That's because to do something like a Gulf Coast Relief and Rebuilding Corps would be using the power of government to do something positive and beneficial at a variety of levels, and why would Bush and Cheney choose to do that when they can simply channel public funds to the private companies they're connected to (like Haliburton) as they always do, and allow them to do the rebuilding, to great profit. (If it happens, it will be yet another blatant example of Bush's crony capitalism.)

I believe that even though the scope of the Katrina disaster is in no way comparable to the scope of the Great Depression, it's worthwhile pointing out the differences between the Republican way of doing things, as exemplified by Herbert Hoover's failure to do anything substantive to ameliorate the effects of the Depression, and the Democratic way of doing things, as exemplified by FDR's New Deal programs. The comparison is apt because it's the clear goal of the Right to roll us back to a pre-New Deal state. (In fact, they'd probably be happiest with a new age of Robber Barons to divide up the country amongst themselves -- or perhaps some form of corporate feudalism would be even more pleasing to them.)

So, unless Karl Rove sees some political advantage to Bush in doing so, it's unlikely that we're going to see anything like a Gulf Coast Relief and Rebuilding Corps anytime soon, however benficial it might have been. It's easier to stick the evacuees in unused HUD housing and give them $2000 debit cards to live off of.

Of course, what will happen when that $2000 runs out? Do I really have to quote the old saw about teaching a man to fish versus giving him a fish?


Incidentally, if Bush does propose something like a Gulf Coast Corps, I'd keep a very close watch on it, because it's likely to be a Potemkin village of a program, all surface and no depth, a cheap attempt to steal some approval points for Bush.

On that same subject, superficial and sham programs designed for show, I was commenting today to a friend that it amazed me that Bush & Company, who are the past masters at that sort of charade, couldn't even muster a fake response to Katrina to hold off the criticism that was bound to come from their failure to respond quickly and in force:

[W]ith our government decimated by the depravations of the right wing, [it] couldn't even manage to *pretend* to get [the relief effort] going. I mean, think about it -- in terms of public relations, all Bush really needed to do was provide the media with a good show of trucks, helicopters, Guardsman and an apparent fervor of activity. It didn't matter (from this superficial viewpoint) whether the thing was effective or not, just like after 9/11 they would have gotten the benefit of the doubt [from both the public and the media] and bought themselves some time to actually get things going. (And, ironically, a sham show of aid would probably have acted like a placebo to help hold off the beginning of the sense of panic which set in -- so it would actually have done some good.) But [they] couldn't even *fake it*.

In that light, the Bush response to Katrina failed everyone, even themselve and their own best interests.

Addendum: This is not on topic, but I'll keep the format of these Katrina posts of continuing to add on to them until I think a new post is warranted. The always interesting Publius has some edifying things to say about Katrina and racism -- "post-racism," actually.

[More Katrina posts]