ReThink History: Roosevelt's Forest Army

society, culture, history · EN-US

In the spring of 1933, with a quarter of the country out of work, Franklin Roosevelt did something never repeated: in thirty-seven days he turned a campaign idea into a standing army of young men with shovels. The Civilian Conservation Corps enrolled more than three million men over nine years, paid them thirty dollars a month, and sent them out to plant some three billion trees, cut a hundred and twenty-five thousand miles of trail, and build eight hundred parks. Across the whole of the New Deal it was the single most popular thing Washington ever did. Roosevelt's Forest Army is a fourteen-part history of that program: its scope and scale, what it built and what it cost, the men it transformed, the libraries and art it made, and the people it left out — Black men segregated by order, the Native men of the Indian Division, the Hispanic and territorial enrollees its records barely counted, and the women shut out entirely. It ends with the strangest fact of all: Congress killed its most