FDR - Jean Edward Smith [200]
The legislative floodgates were open. The week after FDR sent his farm bill to Congress, he asked for quick authorization to establish a civilian conservation corps, which would employ young men in reforestation and flood control; requested $500 million in federal funds to provide direct relief for the unemployed; and urged the necessity of a public works program to put people to work. These were quickly followed by requests for regulation of the securities market, mortgage relief for home owners, establishment of a Tennessee Valley Authority, and the rehabilitation of the nation’s railroads.46 There was no particular order in which the bills were submitted. Roosevelt was still operating with only a handful of his own appointees. As soon as they were able to get on top of the situation and draft the necessary legislation, FDR sent it forward.
The Civilian Conservation Corps became one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. By the time the United States entered World War II, the CCC had put more than 3 million young men to work for $30 a month ($25 of which they were required to send home to their families) planting trees, thinning saplings, cutting firebreaks, building bridges, digging reservoirs—the gamut of vigorous outdoor activity to protect, enhance, and reclaim the nation’s natural resources.
The CCC was Roosevelt’s personal idea. Throughout his life FDR had an abiding interest in conservation, and reforestation ranked high on his list of personal priorities. At Hyde Park he sometimes planted 20,000 to 50,000 trees a year on his estate.47 As governor of New York when the Depression hit, he had initiated a work program that by 1932 employed 10,000 men planting trees throughout the state. In his acceptance speech at Chicago, he promised to put a million men to work fighting soil erosion and reforesting the landscape.48 And during his first week of office, when he was grappling with the banking crisis, he found time to draft a bill that would provide employment for 500,000 men in the nation’s forests.
On Thursday, March 9, the day Congress convened and the banking bill was passed, FDR explained his proposal to secretaries Ickes and Dern, gave them a one-page summary, and instructed them to draft the necessary legislation by nine that evening. After signing the banking bill, Roosevelt read over the draft, made a few changes, and invited Miss Perkins and Secretary Wallace to comment. During the next week the program was scaled back to an initial 250,000 men, but the basic structure of Roosevelt’s plan remained intact. The men, ages eighteen to twenty-five, would live in government-built camps, food and clothing would be provided, and the pay would be a dollar a day. Enlistment would be for six months, with possible renewals up to two years. The Labor Department would recruit the men, the Army would run the camps, and the Forestry Service would supervise the work.
“I think I will go ahead with this,” FDR told Moley, “—the way I did with beer.”49 At his press conference on March 15, Roosevelt revealed his plan on background, explaining in remarkable detail the ins and outs of forest management.50 The following week he sent his proposal to Congress. “I estimate that 250,000 men can be given temporary employment by early summer if you give me authority to proceed within the next two weeks.”51 Organized labor voiced misgivings: first at the dollar-a-day pay, which, they argued, would depress wages throughout the country; then at the regimentation of camp living. “It smacks of fascism, of Hitlerism, of a form of sovietism,” said William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor.52
Roosevelt moved quickly to douse the criticism. Yes, the pay was only a dollar a day, he told reporters on March 22, but it cost the government another dollar a day to feed and house the men. “Two dollars a day would probably