A closer look

The Civilian Conservation Corps and 20th Century Environmentalism

How did a New Deal work program influence Americans’ attitudes about conserving the natural world?

by Nate Sleeter, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University

What Was the CCC?

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of the many New Deal programs that put the unemployed to work on public projects. Established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the program targeted young men aged eighteen to twenty-five, like Stanley Rozmus, who decades later recalled joining the CCC in 1941 at the age of sixteen to earn money for his family. His work with the CCC took him to the Shenandoah Valley, where he planted trees alongside other young men who blazed hiking trails, built roads, hauled rocks, and constructed recreational facilities. Half of the recruits came from urban areas, and the CCC assignment was their first time living and working in forest wilderness. One CCC member from New York City working in the West noted that although the work was hard, the majestic Rocky Mountains and streams changed him into a stronger and healthier person.

In putting young men to work in the wilderness, the CCC not only provided them with food, lodging, work experience, and wages to send home to their families, it left an indelible mark on the lives of many of them, as well as on the landscape itself. On a larger scale, the work undertaken by the CCC began to shift ideas (many rooted in Progressive-era notions of wilderness protection) about the natural environment and the conservation of natural resources, and helped shape the future of environmentalism in the United States.

Conserving and Reshaping Public Land

The CCC initially focused on basic conservation goals like fighting and preventing forest fires, planting trees, and preventing soil erosion through new farming techniques. But the almost immediate popularity of the CCC with both participants and the general public enabled the Roosevelt administration to expand its work to include building state and national parks and creating hiking trails that would allow greater public access to outdoor recreation. In many cases, however, the public who could access these recreation facilities was limited. In the South many of the state parks observed Jim Crow racial restrictions; most barred African Americans from park spaces entirely and others created racially separate recreation and picnic areas. In other areas, many low-income urban residents lacked access if they could not afford automobiles to visit the faraway parks.

In its construction of the Shenandoah National Park, the CCC went even further than just conserving the area. Instead, they created what historian Ethan Carr would later call “wilderness by design.” CCC workers, such as Rozmus, built an aesthetically pleasing landscape for visitors, which replaced the dominant hardwoods of the region with an attractive mix of chestnut trees, white pine, Canadian hemlock, red spruce, and balsam firs among others.

Over the course of the program, CCC enrollees planted two billion trees, slowed soil erosion on forty million acres of farmland, and created eight hundred new state parks, while developing national parks across the country for outdoor recreation. The CCC widely publicized its projects through thousands of press releases, over thirty motion pictures, and hundreds of news stories. Magazine articles that heralded the CCC as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” increased public awareness about environmental issues. The combination of widespread publicity about the work of the CCC, increased public access to state and national parks, and the exposure of thousands of CCC participants to conservation work brought more diverse awareness and interest in the conservation movement, which had previously relied largely on a small cohort of elite and upper-middle-class nature enthusiasts and horticulturalists.

Changing Ideas About Conservation Challenge the CCC

By the mid-1930s, some conservationists and scientists began to question the CCC’s approach to conservation. These critics objected to the program’s demolition of natural habitats and its lack of awareness about ecological systems. Much of the CCC’s work in preventing forest fires relied on clearing undergrowth that was essential to wildlife and building forest roads for fire trucks that divided habitats. Likewise, CCC programs to control mosquitoes drained wetlands that provided breeding grounds for waterfowl, and the extensive planting of pine trees where hardwoods had once grown completely altered the ecology of forests. The CCC’s approach to opening up wilderness areas for greater public enjoyment also came under attack. Projects such as a three-hundred-mile scenic highway through the Blue Ridge Mountains were denounced as eliminating the very wilderness that they claimed to be conserving.

Historian Neil Maher argues that the CCC’s extensive intervention in the nation’s environment, and the criticism it engendered, became the foundation of the modern environmental movement. By creating new landscapes for Americans to use and by providing outdoor experiences to millions of young men, the CCC generated a broad constituency for environmentalism attuned to the need for ecological planning and wilderness preservation. As a result, the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s had a broader base of support as it fought for legislative protections, including the Land and Water Conservation Act (1964), the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System/Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), the Clean Air Act (1970) and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970).

Reflection Questions

Why do you think the CCC became so popular during the Great Depression?

How did the CCC raise public consciousness about environmental issues?

How did the CCC’s approach to conservation differ from the ecological approach?

The CCC engaged thousands of young men in environmental work paid for by the U.S. government. If the government started a comparable program to address issues of climate change, what might that program include?

Additional Reading

Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

Reed Engle, “Shenandoah: Wilderness by Design?,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/wilderness-by-design.htm.

Neil M. Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Related Chapters

The Great Depression and the First New Deal, 1929-1935