Texas State Parks and the CCC: The Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps

1. The CCC Creates a Texas State Parks System

3 When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933, the United States was experiencing the worst economic depression in its history. Factories had closed, banks and companies had become bankrupt, and a quarter of all workers were unemployed. Agricultural income had plummeted, and debts, exacerbated by an unprecedented drought in the Southwest, had driven many farmers from their land. To get the nation back on its feet, Roosevelt created an array of programs known collectively as the New Deal. One of these programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), was aimed at putting young men back to work improving national and state forests and parks. Almost 3 million Americans, most of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, but including some destitute veterans of World War I and even the Spanish-American War, joined the CCC between 1933 and its disbanding not quite ten years later. An estimated fifty thousand were assigned to work in Texas during six-month enlistments, with a maximum of two years’ service allowed. Guided by ideas and designs prepared by professional architects in the National Park Service (NPS), CCC enrollees constructed trails, cabins, concession buildings, bathhouses, dance pavilions, and even one hotel and a motor court to attract visitors to Texas parks.1 Before 1930, Texas state parks had totaled just over eight hundred acres, on which fourteen state parks existed. In 1942, after CCC workers had finished transforming land into places for public recreation, there were almost sixty thousand acres and forty-eight parks.2 By the time the companies were disbanded in 1942, CCC workers had laid the foundations for today’s Texas state park system. Understanding the Great Depression When a typical young enrollee jumped out of a transport truck at a CCC work site in Texas, he had only limited knowledge of the circumstances that brought ˜ The CCC Creates a Texas State Parks System 4 Chapter 1 him there. He was, of course, keenly aware of his father’s unemployed plight and his family’s desperate need for income. He knew that jobs in his hometown were nowhere to be found and that neighboring families were in the same fix as his. But the economic forces that had brought his family and hometown to their knees were probably beyond his knowledge. To be sure, he had observed how the well-off in his town had benefited from the previous decade, the Roaring Twenties, though his family and most others he knew had gained little from that decade of financial extravagance. He knew only that whatever had happened was now being paid for many times over in the misery of relatives and friends. The typical CCC worker, if he had reached the age of twenty-one, probably voted for the first time in 1932 and had most likely cast his ballot for Roosevelt and other Democratic Party candidates rather than Herbert Hoover and the Republicans . As president after 1928, Hoover had for four years relied mainly on reduced government spending to restore business confidence and on voluntary local and private sources of relief to lessen the average American’s plight. These measures were in step with laissez-faire economic doctrines at the time. Personally, Hoover took heart from the success he had enjoyed overseeing the delivery of humanitarian aid to millions of Europeans on the brink of starvation in the wake of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and other wartime upheavals. But accepted laissezfaire ideas and largely voluntary aid efforts proved ineffective in the face of the unprecedented economic collapse that unfolded between 1930 and 1932. Photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) capture the hopelessness, enforced idleness, and haunted faces of millions of Americans durA family from Oklahoma (foreground) makes their home in a California farming community’s tent city for migrant workers. (FDR Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York) The CCC Creates a Texas State Parks System 5 ing the Depression years. As social scientists Kenneth Holland and Frank Ernest Hill wrote a few years later, “Millions had left their homes to crowd in upon unwilling relatives or occupy unused farm buildings.” Businesses had disappeared, and the employees of those that remained wondered if they would be the next to be laid off. “It was,” Holland and Hill wrote, “a cheerless time of pay cuts, part-time labor, distracted social volunteers, apple vendors, bank closures, panhandlers, men on park benches, and riots of...