Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews

12. Richard Melzer

187 Richard Melzer Introduction Richard Melzer is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico Valencia campus and has served as the president of the New Mexico Historical Society. The author of many books and articles on New Mexico and the Southwest, he is a leading scholar of the history of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in New Mexico and has written a fine book entitled Coming of Age in the Great Depression: The Civilian Conservation Corps Experience in New Mexico, 1933–1942 (2000). In June 2006, I wended my way through the Valencia campus to Melzer’s office, where I met a historian with an evolved sense of humor and thought to myself that if I were to begin anew as a history major, I would definitely want Richard Melzer as a professor. During our interview , he not only provided an historic perspective of the CCC in New Mexico, but also colored in the gray zones and made the history real. The CCC was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) favorite projects . The CCC workers were trained by military personnel and thus were inadvertently prepared to participate in the terrible war that followed the Great Depression. Not only did the CCC help restore natural habitat in New Mexico and beyond, but it also fostered the environmental viewpoints of thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. Richard Melzer, photo by author 188 / Economic Depression in the Land of Clear Light Richard Melzer JL: Would you give me an overview of your research into the Civilian Conservation Corps, also known as the CCC? RM: Years and years ago I did research on coal-mining camps in New Mexico, starting with Madrid and then Dawson, and of course the great design was to do Gallup, too, or the small camps outside of Gallup. But I only got as far as Dawson. My main focus was on the Depression in those camps. So my first book is on the Great Depression in Madrid. JL: Your major focus, as I understand it, is the CCC. I wonder if you could talk about the history of how that came to be in New Mexico and then maybe talk about some of your favorite CCC sites. RM: I wonder if it would be helpful to mention what I did in the intro to that book, which explained how I got involved in the CCC, which really came out of my studies of the mining camps. I was interviewing a man who had graduated from the high school in Dawson in the late 1930s, and he said that the day he graduated from high school was the darkest day of his life. That’s so unusual because that’s supposed to be a day full of promise, optimism. Of course, I had to ask why. He said, “There were no jobs.” Phelps Dodge wasn’t hiring at Dawson, and there weren’t any jobs in the local area, Raton, or other places. The only people who were really lucky in that class were the guys who got to join the CCC. So I had heard of the CCC, of course, but never in such compelling terms. That began the pursuit—it lasted about twenty years—[of] interviewing eventually about a hundred fellows from the CCC. As that generation began to die out, I realized that I needed to put this in writing so that they would have it and share it with their families and their generations. So I finally drew a line in the sand—you know how that goes—and began to write. Got Richard Melzer / 189 more and more interested in it. Of course, it was the most popular New Deal agency. Even conservatives liked the CCC. There’s something to like for every political group, it seemed, because it was so helpful to the young men who were involved with it. Of course, New Mexico was incredibly fortunate. We had two great politicians who were heavily involved in getting federal projects here: Clyde Tingley as our governor and, of course, Dennis Chavez as our senator by 1935. They were just great in getting funding for projects of all kinds—many different New Deal projects, of course, but including the CCC. The CCC was FDR’s pet project. It was the first project he proposed during his first hundred days, a period...