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Program interweaves rich archival imagery with the personal accounts of CCC veterans to tell the story of one of the boldest and most popular New Deal experiments.
In March 1933, within weeks of his inauguration, President Franklin
Roosevelt sent legislation to Congress aimed at providing relief
for the one out of every four American workers who were unemployed.
He proposed a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to provide jobs in
natural resource conservation. Over the next decade, the CCC put
more than three million young men to work in the nation's forests
and parks, planting trees, building flood barriers, fighting fires
and maintaining roads and trails. Corps workers lived in camps
under quasi-military discipline and received a wage of $30 per
month, $25 of which they were required to send home to their
families. This program interweaves rich archival imagery with the
personal accounts of CCC veterans to tell the story of one of the
boldest and most popular New Deal experiments, positioning it as a
pivotal moment in the emergence of modern environmentalism and
federal unemployment relief.