The New Deal’s Forest Army: How the Civilian Conservation Corps Worked by Benjamin F. Alexander (review)

“One thing was clear: somebody was going to have to do something successfully for the nation,” writes Benjamin F. Alexander in his new book, The New Deal’s Forest Army: How the Civilian Conservation Corps Worked (p. 4). Highlighting the urgent need for the federal government to “do something” to ease the suffering of millions of Americans in the grips of poverty and unemployment during the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was organized to solve a number of interrelated problems, including massive unemployment, widespread transience, and deforestation. Considered Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “pet project,” the CCC was composed of millions of young men, “enrollees,” serving in the “forest army,” planting millions of trees for reforestation efforts as well as responding to a variety of conservation needs across the diverse terrain of the continental United States, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska (p. 2). Alexander’s work illuminates many of the program’s enduring environmental legacies, such as the development of the country’s national parks, infrastructure, and forests.

The chapter “How Boys and Men Joined the CCC” is one of the more fascinating parts of Alexander’s work. Initially only accepting enrollees between eighteen and twenty-five years of age, the CCC eventually opened up to a variety of potential candidates. The decision to include unemployed veterans was precipitated by a number of factors, including the growing number of World War I soldiers protesting in Washington, D.C., for access to unpaid military bonuses. Refreshingly, Alexander goes beyond the obvious experience of young white men to include the participation of African Americans, Native Americans, and even women enrollees in the CCC’s sister, “She-She-She,” camps (p. 28).

Interestingly, Alexander situates the program’s origins in the broader moral panic about transient youth that occurred during the Great Depression. In 1932 the Children’s Bureau of the Labor Department published the “Memorandum on Transient Boys,” explaining the internal migration of young people as not only a labor problem but also a youth crisis, with transient adolescents creating a “‘great underground world,’” in the words of a contemporary journalist, outside the norms of society (p. 5). Local communities often anxiously feared the influx of transient male youths into their towns, which required that “considerable public relations work went into the running of the CCC at every stage of its life” for the bureaucracies overseeing the program (p. 34). Other popular concerns included the accusation that the CCC served as a propaganda outfit to militarize the nation’s youth. Ironically, it was World War II that led to the CCC’s dismantling, as young men were drafted to serve in the military.

Alexander’s work is effective in the meticulous detailing of the backgrounds, experiences, and labors of the CCC enrollees. Perhaps he does not go far enough in his discussion of the intersection of race and gender and the lived experiences of the women of the She-She-She camps. Yet The New Deal’s Forest Army skillfully illuminates why the CCC remains a popular topic for scholars and students alike—the enduring power of an innovative program that paired unemployed youth with jobs and addressed immediate environmental and infrastructure problems.