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With talk swirling that President-elect Obama might be thinking of a 21st century Civilian Conservation Corps, it seems only fitting that we take a look back at the original CCC.
This photo, taken in May 1933 in Rocky Mountain National Park, depicts CCC workers ready to head off to their various work sites in the park.
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Actually, the CCC did some beautiful work in the Parks that has mostly endured and seldom been equalled since by the National Park Service. I'll bet they could lay a water line that would not need replacing several times a decade as has the one at Paradise, Mt. Rainier. Judging by the photo, the vegetative impacts look to be about the same though. The proposed new program might do alright if the Army ran it again instead of the NPS. And what could be more socialist than the idea of National Parks?
@Frank: You really believe that, do you? And your economic theories aren't shattered by the recent developments, right?
Fact is: The CCC created values. Values that we still use because they still enhance our National Parks, National Monuments, National Recreation Areas and about 800 State Parks that were created in the first place by the CCC. They build roads and installed tens of thousands miles of telephone lines in rural areas. They preserved soils in the Dust Bowl by planting trees (OK, I admit that some of them were tamarisks that are giving us trouble now). They put up around 8 million man-days fighting fires in National Forests, preserving primary forests and the wealth in timber.
The CCC kept up the work ethics of the participants, who came from families where no one in the whole family did any work, had any reason to get up in the morning. In Chicago the crime rate dropped by 55% with the introduction of the program and a judge attributed that exclusively to the CCC. The participants got healthy and enough food, health care, trained their skills and furthered their education. Some 40.000 illiterates learned to read and write while in the CCC. After 1937 all camps had courses in a variety of topics, some up to College level.
The direct economic stimulus was distributed between the rural areas where the camps were located and the urban centers where the participants came from, because from their salary the participants kept only a nominal part and at least $25 per month had to be send to the families at home. Imagine what those $300 per family and year did to the local businesses.
Frankly: I doubt there was any better way to spend the costs of around $1000 per Person.