ccc stand up: the influence of the civilian conservation corps educational program in modern times

8/8/2019 CCC Stand Up: The Influence of the Civilian Conservation Corps Educational Program in Modern Times

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A brief look at the Civilian Conservation Corps

Educational Program, 19331942, and its

influence on work study and literacy programs in

modern times.

Presented by the

FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF STUDIES IN

THE

A R T S , S C I E N C E S & H U M A N I T I E S

U.S.A

3rd Corps CCC Educational Advisors

Assembled at the University of MarylandFrom the Tinsman Collection

WILL THE REAL CCC

PLEASE STAND UP?

G. A. Lane


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G. A. Lane is a student of the liberalarts with a thirty-five year background in the

field of museum studies. He has worked asa professional woodcarver and furniture

maker since opening his first shop in 1982and continues to work on an occasional

contract basis with various professional andacademic theater programs as a scenic

carpenter.

Lanes interest in the CivilianConservation Corps began in 1972, when his

father, the late Hal Lane, became the Artist /

Historian for the Arkansas State ParksDepartment. The family moved to Petit JeanMountain in Central Arkansas at that time,

and Lane spent his high school yearsstudying the architecture at the state park at

Petit Jean, which is a legacy of CCC

Company V-1718.

In the early 1970s, there were still members in the local community near Petit

Jean Mountain who had either worked at the CCC camps as enrollees or who had vividmemories of the presence of the Corp in the area. Lane also had good access to historical

records of the CCC due to his fathers position with the State Parks Department. Thiswas all a rich learning experience for Lane as a young boy, and much of the work he has

done through the years since then has been influenced by the designs and techniquesused by the CCC in its construction work.

Lanes hope is that this article will inspire new generations of students to

investigate the objectives and methods that made the CCC such a uniquely successfulprogram. In this, there will surely arise a new respect for the works of those eager young

enrollees and the advisors who raised them up to become one of the most productive

generations this country has ever known.

WILL THE REAL CCC

PLEASE STAND UP? MMX. By G. A. Lane

Copyright 2010. All Rights Reserved

Presented by the

FOUNDATION FOR THEADVANCEMENT OF STUDIES IN THE

AR T S , S C I E N C E S & H U M A N I T I E S

U . S . A .


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WILL THE REAL CCC PLEASE STAND UP?

G. A. Lane

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC or Corps) was formed by the U.S. Congressunder the Emergency Conservation Work Act in April 1933. Although at the onset providing a

major formal educational experience for the enrollees was hardly considered as an importantobjective, many of the program administrators soon recognized the great potential to enhance the

effectiveness of the Corps if the enrollees studied a broader range of technical skills than thebasic training for the field work required of them.

1One objective of the program was to return

the enrollees to society as more valuable citizens: better able to function in the everyday worldand better able to meet the challenges of the modern, industrialized job market. Providing the

opportunity for these young men to learn about social studies, reading and writing, and othertraditional subjects was a good way to meet this objective. Within a few months after the

opening of the first CCC camp, the Department of the Interior - Office of Education prepared amanual entitled A Handbook for the Educational Advisors in the Civilian Conservation Corps

Camps. This marked the beginning of the CCC Educational Program.2

Because the Educational Program of the CCC ultimately proved to be highly successful in thisstated objective, calls for the revival of the CCC or a close emulation of its methods in public

education have continued through the decades since 1942. In some ways, this has beenapproached with newer programs. However, the true impetus and effectiveness of the original

program has not been fully realized in these attempts of modern times. In order to understandthe persistence of this request and also the reasons why modern programs are failing to meet the

standard of success in the CCC program, it is important to first understand why the program wasso uniquely successful in its day and to consider where the differences between it and the modern

attempts at emulation occur.

The original purpose of the Civilian Conservation Corps was to combat a plague of

deforestation and soil erosion in America. It was primarily a conservation program in thatregard. Another problem that the nation faced as the Great Depression settled in was a high levelof unemployment. The plight of young men in urban environments who would normally be

entering the job market for the typical on-the-job training of the day was of great concern because these youths were particularly at risk of being recruited by the insidious criminal

underworld that had become prominent during the Roaring Twenties.3 In contrast to the

____________

1. Frank Ernest Hill, The Educational Program of the Civilian Conservation Corps. (New York: AmericanAssociation for Adult Education, 1939), 8-9.

2. Arlene Barry, "Is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s a 1990s approach to dropouts and

illiteracy?",Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 42, no. 8 (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, May

1999): 648 -650.

3. Arlene Barry, 649.


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problems faced in the cities, the young men who lived in rural areas were often groomed to alifestyle that reflected the more traditional agrarian foundations of a young American nation.

The education for industrialization and modernization was not widely promoted in the

curriculums of the schools in the rural districts.

4

The common problem for both the rural and urban youths during the Great Depression

was a deficiency in their education that left them ill prepared to compete with older men whowere often already skilled and experienced workers. In fact, among those who were targeted as

eligible for enrollment in the CCC a common characteristic was that they rejected the methodsand curriculums of the public education system, finding no value in studies that would not

immediately put them into the labor force and make wage earners of them.5

Large numbers ofthe CCC enrollees were dropouts, having left school because of dissatisfaction with the

traditional methods or simply because they were forced out into the world to find work tosupport their families. Many enrollees were illiterate. Because of this they were reluctant to

participate in any activity that seemed to be a traditional school program. Creating aneducational program that would draw these young men in without rubbing them the wrong way

became a particular challenge for the CCC leadership.

One approach to correcting problems of social misconduct that was popular in the earlyTwentieth Century was what is generally termed as legislated morality, or what historian Paul

Boyer calls, coercive moral reform.6

This was typified in the temperance movement and thesubsequent Prohibition Act. The hope of this philosophy was that proper behavior and

development could be imposed upon the population through social and legal pressures. Analternate method of directing social development arose with the popularity of a new progressive

education philosophy promoted in the works of John Dewey. From this perspective, the externalimposition of rules and moral standards had a limited success in the direction of human conduct.

This alternate method was founded in the idea that, as Dewey stated, the intelligent selectionand determination of the environments in which we act, had the greater affect on individual

behavior.7

This perspective ultimately became one of the great motivations to form the CCC as

____________

4. Patrick Clancy, "Conserving the Youth: The Civilian Conservation Corps Experience in the Shenandoah

National Park," Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 105, no. 4 (1997): 439-472.

5. Patrick Clancy, 648.

Leslie Alexander Lacy, The Soil Soldiers: The Civilian Conservation Corps in the Great Depression.(Randor, PA. Chilton, c.1976), 42-43.

6. Paul Boyer, qtd. in,Neil M Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of

the American Environmental Movement, (Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 31.

7. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, Intelligence and Morals, (Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 1965), 74.


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an environment that provided productive labor and social activity for the enrollees. The text ofA Handbook for the Educational Advisors in the Civilian Conservation Corps Camps was based

on the principle of enticing the enrollees to participate in the educational program withoutcoercion.8 The methods of instruction in the CCC camps consequently became dramatically

different from the standards of traditional public educational programs.

During the tenure of the Corps from1933 to 1942, several high level officials andeducators both within and outside the CCC administration argued that the program should

provided a model for the national education system. The German researcher Kiran Klaus Patelwrites of the hopes of one group of educators, including the famous progressive education

philosopher John Dewey and CCC Camp Education Director Clarence S. Marsh, that, Theywere eager to use the CCC as an experimental field and a starting point for new forms of

teaching in all educational institutions.9

The views of Marsh in particular express the push toexpand the influence of the program at the national level. Marsh states that, There is a need for

a shift of emphasis in the CCC. The whole concept should be that the CCC is an essential part ofthe American educational structure.

10 Many of the precepts of progressive education philosophy

were implemented in the CCC Educational Program, and this was an essential key to its success.

The push to make the CCC an experiment in education gave rise to the development of ahost of innovative methods that were relatively unique to the American experience in their day.

One outstanding aspect of the program is that the enrollees were subsidized in their schooling bythe federal government in exchange for their work with the CCC. Another important aspect of

the curriculums created within the program is that they were primarily vocational in nature,intending to prepare the enrollees to compete in the job market at the work-a-day level and not

presuming to matriculate them as professional practitioners and business managers. Both ofthese aspects of the CCC Educational Program have derived into important modern collegiate

institutions.

Because the crash of the stock market on Black Thursday [October 24 th, 1929], had such adevastating effect throughout the American economy, by 1933 there was hardly an institution of

higher learning in the country that was not at the verge of collapse, both financially and also interms of enrollment. Inspired by the aggressive programs initiated during FDRs first 100 days

in office, University of Minnesota president, Dr. Lotus Coffman, rationalized that, Federalprograms were now being formulated to employ hundreds of thousands of the nations youth in

what would become the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Why not implement a similar typeof federal aid for young people who wanted to attend college?

11 Coffman gained the support of

__________

9. Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Services in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933 1945, (Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Google Books, 263.

10. Calvin W. Gower, "The Civilian Conservation Corps and American Education: Threat To Local Control?,"

History of Education Quarterly 7, no. 1(1967): 58-70.

11. Tim Brady, Students for Hire. University of Minnesota Alumni Association: 4.


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Minnesota Governor, Floyd Olson, and in 1933, . . . these two laid plans for what wouldbecome the first federal financial aid program for college students in United States history.

12

The college relief program, which is now known as the federal work-study program resulteddirectly from Coffmans desire to emulate the CCCs innovativeness in this regard.

An interesting aspect of the CCC program that is closely related to the work study program is that it absorbed into its ranks several college engineering students who wereparticipating in what was called the, cooperative system. In this program, first conceptualized

and implemented in 1906 by Dr. Herman Schneider, Dean of the College of Engineering andCommerce at the University of Cincinnati, engineering students alternated regular class work

with periods of paid internships with related industries.13

The wages of these intern studentswere paid by the companies for which they worked. But when the Great Depression came into

full swing many of those companies simply went out of business, leaving the students unable tocomplete the requirements of their internships. When 40 of the co-op work program students

were enrolled in CCC Company 1538 the wages for their internship work were then paid by thegovernment and an important supporting precedent for the college relief program was

established.

Another innovation resulting from the CCC Educational Program that has becomeinstitutionalized in the American academic system derived from a long time vision held by U.S.

Commissioner of Education George Zook. Zook realized that the opportunity to provide afocused vocational education through such a program provided a perfect intermediate

educational experience for those students who exceeded the level of elementary and secondaryschools but who were not yet prepared for or intending to pursue a higher level of professional

training at a four year university or college. This would bring these students out of theenvironment of primary and secondary education, where there was barely a chance to school

them in the most basic aspects of social necessity with no true preparation for vocational orprofessional employment, and give them the chance to learn viable skills with which to enter the

job market. Also, this would release the four year universities and colleges to focus on higher professional oriented curriculums. As early as 1926, Zook had delivered an address to the

FIFTY-FIFTH ANNUAL MEETI NG of the Ohio College Association and ALLIEDSOCIETIES in which he expressed that this should be a goal of the ever growing Junior College

Movement. In this address, Zook acknowledged one of the main impairments of the universitiesof the day. He stated that:

It is common knowledge that in this country elementary schools and the colleges were established

almost contemporaneously. Under these circumstances it was natural that the field of elementaryeducation should be pushed up and the field of college education brought down, so that when the

American secondary school was established it had to be sandwiched in between an extended elementary

school eight or nine years in length, and a college which had reached down into what is really the field ofsecondary education. . . . The college, therefore, is compelled to complete in the freshman and sophomoreyears the general secondary education of their students before they can begin their real function of

higher education. . .

__________

12. Tim Brady. 4.

13 Kathy Mays Smith, Gold Medal Company 1538: A Documentary. (Paducah, KY, Turner Publishing Company, 2001).22.


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One of the unfortunate results of this lack of unification at the present time is the repetition of

subject matter and the consequent waste of time which practically every student is subjected to. Thiswaste of time has been reliably estimated by Professor L. V. Kobos, in his recent book on the juniorcollege, as equivalent to a half of the school year. Such a waste is a terrific price to pay for the

preservation of the traditional organizations of secondary and higher education in this country. . .

The public junior college, therefore, should be in a position to continue the vocational education

which has been begun in the high school and offer additional courses on a semiprofessional level in

technical, agricultural, nursing and home economics education.14

When President Roosevelt named Zook as U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1933, he

became directly involved in the work of defining the parameters of the CCC EducationalProgram in its early stages. The idea that junior colleges should have as their distinctly separate

purpose the agenda of vocational education found its footing in the successful experiment of theCCC program.

An important major difference between the CCC program and traditional public schoolswas that, although there were seven government agencies and departments involved with the

Corps overall, the management of all aspects of camp life was in the hands of the WarDepartment. Because of this the camp schools and the CCC program in general began to take on

the appearance of a military operation.15

The regimentation of the CCC labor force alsorepresented a major change in the way that young men trained to enter the job market. The

enrollees were subject to a form of discipline that most of them had never encountered before intheir lives. One authority on the influence of the War Department over the training of the

enrollees writes of the distinction between the common notion of discipline as punishment tocorrect improper behavior and the meaning of this term as it is understood in Army circles.

Kathy Mays Smith writes, The definition of Discipline is training, especially training of themind or character. She continues to note that, Army regulations defined discipline as that

mental attitude and state of training which render obedience and proper conduct instinctive underall conditions. It is founded upon respect for, and loyalty to, properly constituted authority. It

really is more a quality that is instilled into a man by careful training and not through fear ofpunishment.

16This aspect of the Corps, which was an essential ingredient in its success, is

often overlooked or disregarded by modern program planners. This level of regimentation anddiscipline is seldom realized or even sought after in other systems of education.

_________

14 George Zook, "The Extent and Significance of the Junior College Movement." Transactions of the Fifty-

sixth Annual Meeting of the Ohio College Association (April, 1927): 8-11

15 Leslie Alexander Lacy, The Soil Soldiers: The Civilian Conservation Corps in the Great Depression, 18.

16. Kathy Mays Smith, Army Discipline & The CCC. CCC Legacy Journal33, no. 1 (January / February

2009): 7.


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During the decades since the days of the CCC, there have been dramatic changes in theeducational needs of American students. These have resulted from major advances in the

technologies of industrial production, the host of services that have grown out of this, and a plethora of communications media that infiltrate the management of a large range of social

institutions. The boundaries between what can be called vocational and professional educational

objectives are not as clear today as they were in 1933. Also, while one objective of the CCCEducational Program was to combat a serious problem of illiteracy in its day, and this was fairlywell done, the broadened scope of communications methods over the years has created new

definitions of literacy that increase the bulk of learning required to be a competent communicatorin the modern world.

A deleterious result of the random attentions in scholastic instruction that have to be

given to each of the many minute realms of literacy, not to mention a multitude of multi-culturalagendas and computer technology competencies required to participate in the modern classroom

experience, is that the necessary levels of instruction to insure that modern students are properlyschooled in the traditional / foundational arts of reading and writing have not been reached in

many modern schools, beginning from the earliest grades. Because of this, the past few decadeshave witnessed an increasing plague of illiteracy among students. This becomes a problem in

our times in the same way that it was in the early 1930s when the CCC Educational Programwas established. This is one of several reasons that calls for a CCC revival have been so

persistent in recent years.17

Some institutions of higher learning did adopt the methods of the program in the

implementation of progressive education philosophy agendas. Also, the work study aspects of

student financial subsidy have become the rule at modern universities and colleges rather than

the exception. The programs of President LBJs Great Society during the 1960s, including the

Job Corps and other educational avenues created by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and

also the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) enacted in 1973, the JobTraining Partnership Act of 1982, and the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 were all designed

to promote at least the ideal of students working their way to a better education and life. Yet

there has continued to be a decline in literacy skills among students in recent decades, and many

educators attribute a high drop-out rate at least in part to this decline. What this tends to indicate

is that the hybrids that only include a frail mimic of the CCC methods do not work.18

Although

intentions in these programs have been progressive so as to keep in step with the times and

address the needs of an advancing technological culture, the fact seems to be that in order to be

as successful as the CCC the recipe of that program must be followed more precisely.

__________

17. Arlene Barry, 657 658.

Wilfred B. Holloway, "Youth EmploymentEducation Programs: Where Are We Headed?,"Education &

Urban Society 14, no. 1 (1981): 33-54.

18. Holloway. 5253.


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As a final note I would like to interject a more personal observation regarding the success ofthe CCC Educational Program. In looking at the CCC to discover what it was about, we

necessarily step into another day and age in the history of American. Although there are fewdirect references to chapel attendance, faith, and prayers in many of the primary resources left

behind by the enrollees and administrators, my feeling is that this is because those aspects of life

were more or less a given in the culture of that day. The enrollees wrote home to their familiesto tell them about the new and unusual details of camp life they did not have the chance toexperience before their enrollment. Never-the-less, the predominant characteristic of the men of

that generation who I have known is that they were men of faith with a reverence for Christianvalues; that generation went to church, and that was the fact of the matter. Sadly, the capacity to

promote those values in modern government managed programs does not exist. Rather, it isdeemed unconstitutional to do so, and personal expressions of faith are viewed as violations of

others civil rights. Under this circumstance, one must wonder if the original recipe can ever beduplicated to render the level of success enjoyed in the CCC of the 30s and 40s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barry, Arlene. "Is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s a 1990s approach to dropouts and illiteracy?,"

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 42, no. 8 (May 1999): 648. http://0-

search.ebscohost.com.ucark.uca.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&AN=1798555&site=ehost-live

Academic Search Elite, EBSCOhost(accessed September 29, 2009).

Brady, Tim. Students for Hire. University of Minnesota Alumni Association: 4.

http://www.minnesotaalumni.org/s/1118/content.aspx?sid=1118&gid=1&pgid=949&cid=2191&ecid=2191

&crid=0&calpgid=918&calcid=2156. (accessed 4 17 2010).

Clancy, Patrick. "Conserving the Youth: The Civilian Conservation Corps Experience in the Shenandoah National

Park," Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 105, no. 4 (1997): 439-472. http://0-

search.ebscohost.com.baileylib.hendrix.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ahl&AN=A000472205.01&site=e

host-liveAmerica: History & Life, EBSCOhost(accessed September 29, 2009).

Dewey, John. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, Intelligence and Morals. Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1965.

Gower, Calvin W. "The Civilian Conservation Corps and American Education: Threat To Local Control?,"History

of Education Quarterly 7, no. 1(1967): 58-70.

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ahl&AN=A000019737.01&site=ehost-liveAmerica: History & Life, EBSCOhost(accessed September 24, 2009).

Hill, Frank Ernest. The Educational Program of the Civilian Conservation Corps. New York: American

Association for Adult Education, 1939.


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Holloway, Wilfred B. "Youth EmploymentEducation Programs: Where Are We Headed?,"Education & Urban

Society 14, no. 1 (1981): 33-54. http://0-

search.ebscohost.com.baileylib.hendrix.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ahl&AN=A000183517.01&site=e

host-liveAmerica: History & Life, EBSCOhost(accessed September 29, 2009).

Lacy, Leslie Alexander. The Soil Soldiers: The Civilian Conservation Corps in the Great Depression. Randor, PA:

Chilton, c.1976.

Maher, Neil M. Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American

Environmental Movement. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Oxley, Howard W. Education In Civilian Conservation Corps Camps . Washington, D.C.: Emergency

Conservation Work (Civilian Conservation Corps), Office of the Director of CCC Camp Education. 1936.

Broward County Library Digital Collections. CCC. Broward County, Florida.:

http://digilab.browardlibrary.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ccc&CISOSTART=1,61 (accessed

November 21, 2009). NOTE: The stable URL is for the page within the collection on which the document

is listed and is not specific to the document.

Patel, Kiran Klaus. Soldiers of Labor: Labor Services in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933 1945 .

Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Google Books,

http://books.google.com/books?id=nqTsBdOzNF4C&pg=PA262&lpg=PA262&dq=%22Clarence+S.+Mars

h%22+CCC&source=bl&ots=A0Yxuxpih2&sig=zKs2k_y5jhKc0Ey-

O6hYEVgSyhg&hl=en&ei=6uQbS9TQBMmrngfaxLnZAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8

&ved=0CCQQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22Clarence%20S.%20Marsh%22%20CCC&f=false (accessed

December 6, 2009)

Smith, Kathy Mays. Army Discipline & The CCC. CCC Legacy Journal 33, no. 1 (January / February 2009)

Gold Medal CCC Company 1538: A Documentary. Paducah, Kentucky: Turner Publishing Company,2001.

Zook, George. "The Extent and Significance of the Junior College Movement." Transactions of the Fifty-sixth

Annual Meeting of the Ohio College Association (April, 1927): 8-11.: http://junior-college-

history.org/Sources/ZookOhio.html(accessed 4 - 17 - 2010)


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CCC ENROLLEES

AT WORKIN THE CAMP SCHOOLS

Cabinet MakingMechanical Drawing

Tailoring Class

Surveying

Raising Poultry

Beef ProjectPhotography and

related Journalism skills

Photos courtesy of the CCC Legacy Archives

ccc stand up: the influence of the civilian conservation corps educational program in modern times

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