THE BEST EXAMPLE of how FDR’s leadership style changed the nation during the Hundred Days was the launching of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a tale of mobilization so rapid and so competent that it almost defies belief for later generations. The lessons for today could hardly be fresher.
The CCC brought together two of Roosevelt’s most deeply held values: work and conservation. Although he greatly expanded relief aid to the states in 1933, FDR never much believed in it. “What I am seeking is the abolition of relief altogether,” he wrote Colonel House the following year. “I cannot say it out loud yet but I hope to be able to substitute work for relief.”
Roosevelt had always harbored a deep interest in conservation. In his alumni report for his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion in 1929, he wrote: “I find time at home to practice forestry, as I would rather plant trees than cut them down.” But his idea for combining that interest with the need to put destitute young people to work immediately was strictly practical, with no roots in theory—even the theory of pragmatism. When he outlined what would eventually become the CCC to Moley in 1932, Moley—always reluctant to admit that his boss had a truly new idea—asked if he had ever taken a course at Harvard with William James, the great pragmatic optimist. The concept behind the CCC seemed inspired by James’s famous essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” FDR replied that although he never studied with James, he remembered him well in Harvard Yard for his whiskers.
FDR’s obliviousness to theories of pragmatism was a blessing, for while his solution was practical, his means of getting there were not, or so thought those around him. Within three days of assuming office, he was already bending Harold Ickes’s ear about having the governor of Florida take over some agricultural lands and use them to settle the unemployed. By March 10, when the governor told him it was impractical to move the men there with their families, FDR summoned Ickes and Henry Wallace to the White House at 9:00 p.m. for an emergency meeting. He told them he wanted to discuss a bill to enlist 500,000 for work on government projects by midsummer, a number he apparently plucked from thin air and later cut in half. And that was just the beginning of what he had in mind.
FDR didn’t waste any time. Eleven days later, on March 21, he unveiled the idea in a message to Congress designed to tell the country that relief and job creation were on the way. The outlines of the CCC were accompanied by a call to create a Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), under which Harry Hopkins supervised relief aid to the states, and a Public Works Administration (PWA), the first of several agencies devoted to developing big, labor-intensive construction projects. Because the CCC was focused on young workers, the PWA aimed to help out the middle-aged unemployed. Hopkins proved to be an exceptionally able administrator and a strong advocate of public compassion. “People don’t eat in the ‘long run,’ Senator,” he later told a congressional committee. “They eat every day.”
Republicans accused Washington of “playing Santa Claus” instead of leaving the giving of alms to state and local authorities. Huey Long, favoring something even more radical, called the CCC “a sapling bill, a sapsucker’s bill.” Roosevelt laughed off the opposition and kept his focus. He knew that dams and other large-scale public works would take many months or years to get off the ground. By contrast, hiring a quarter of a million young men to clear trails, drain swamps, plant trees, fight forest fires, and build cabins in national parks and forests could begin immediately.
Roosevelt was told repeatedly that this was simply impossible, for all sorts of logistical reasons. Even Wallace, despite his reputation for dreaminess, sounded a hardheaded note and said the forestry service couldn’t possibly handle such a large group. Frances Perkins was appalled by FDR’s idea of paying the men only a dollar a day. Her constituency at the Labor Department, the unions, argued that this would bring down wages and that work camps amounted to “forced labor.” The president of the American Federation of Labor, William Green, testified in March that the CCC “smacked of Fascism, Hitlerism, and Sovietism.”
The more his Cabinet said no, the more Roosevelt said yes. Finally, Perkins, trying to be positive, proposed that the U.S. Army be ordered to care for the men in the woods, an assignment the Army didn’t appreciate. Roosevelt approved the Army’s role, but the unions and other liberals continued to object, this time opposing the “militaristic” component. FDR’s solution was classic. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “the Department of Labor will recruit these men.” In other words, if labor doesn’t like it—we’ll make it labor’s responsibility. “Mr. President,” Perkins protested, “You know as well as I do that the Department of Labor has no facilities for recruiting, selecting and transporting these men. What’s more, we have no tents, no cots, no kitchens.”
In this, Perkins was like every exasperated subordinate pleading with a headstrong boss who doesn’t have to worry about the details. But FDR didn’t want to hear any more objections. From his days as assistant secretary of the Navy, when he overcame skepticism about his idea to plant sea mines, he understood how to work through bureaucratic obstacles. Now he became crisply executive: “Resurrect the United States Employment Service [a moribund agency] right away. Use the Labor Department to recruit and select these men.”
FDR’s message was: 250,000 men working in the forests by summer. Do it now and I won’t take any excuses! There was management brilliance in this. “He put the dynamite under the people who had to do the job and let them fumble for their own methods,” as Perkins later put it. This was the presidential leadership that eased the Depression and won World War II.*
But resoluteness was not enough. To achieve these results required something more than broad, ambitious goals by the president. After setting this seemingly unrealistic target, FDR worked on the gearing necessary to make it happen. From his days in the Wilson administration he remembered the names of obscure Interior Department bureaucrats who knew a lot about public lands. He invited members of the House and Senate labor committees to the White House, answered each of their objections, and dazzled them with his detailed knowledge of wage levels. He drew elaborate organization charts sketching lines of authority several levels down in the new agency. “I want personally to check on the location, scope etc of the camps, size [,] work to be done etc.,” he scrawled under one executive order. After the War Department estimated the cost of food and shelter, he wrote, “This figure of $1.92 a day, not including transportation or wages is absurdly high—it must be greatly reduced.”
The bill passed easily, with the only significant amendment coming in the House, where Republican Oscar De Priest of Chicago, the sole black member of Congress, successfully inserted an amendment barring discrimination. FDR signed it on March 31. To mend fences with organized labor, Roosevelt recruited a folksy machinists union vice president he barely knew, Robert Fechner, as director of the agency. When told that hiring a labor man would lead to inefficient administration, he said, “Oh, that doesn’t matter. The Army and the Forestry Service will really run the show. The secretary of labor will select the men and make the rules and Fechner will ‘go along’ and give everybody satisfaction and confidence.”*
This was a charade, because FDR planned to run the whole thing from the White House with Louis Howe. But when Howe insisted on signing off on practically every decision at every camp, paperwork stacked up on his desk. Campsites were not opening quickly enough for the impatient president, in part because most enrollees were in the East while most projects were in the West. To speed the already frenzied mobilization, Roosevelt instructed that more authority be delegated to the Army. The pace led to some bad publicity. Howe was summoned to Capitol Hill to explain why he had approved a contractor’s bid of $1.40 each for 200,000 toilet kits when the Army could provide the same for corps members for 32 cents apiece. He was cleared of corruption, but the flap set a precedent for aggressive, bipartisan congressional oversight of the New Deal. Unlike some later presidents, FDR often welcomed such accountability because it helped him improve his programs.
The urgency and resourceful problem solving paid off. By April 7, only thirty-four days into the administration, the first corps members were enlisted. By July 1, less than four months after Roosevelt made his outlandish demand, he exceeded his quarter-million goal. Nearly 275,000 young men were enrolled in 1,300 camps across the country, supporting their families and undertaking much-needed projects. Although no women were allowed in the CCC, blacks, housed mostly in segregated camps, eventually made up 10 percent of corps members and 14,000 American Indians were immediately included.* Colonel Duncan Major reported to Roosevelt that the speed of the mobilization had broken “all American war and peacetime records.” And it has not been matched since.
Beyond providing work and improving the countryside, Roosevelt’s “Tree Army” helped keep the peace. On April 29, Howe received word that the Bonus Army—the collection of ragtag veterans that had delivered the coup de grace to Herbert Hoover—was coming back to town. This was troubling, as it came on the heels of reports of more unrest in the farm belt; a bankruptcy judge had been dragged from his courtroom, beaten, and almost lynched in LeMars, Iowa. Within days, more than six thousand scraggly veterans showed up for the reprise, with more on the way. The men promised to be orderly, but with the cuts in veterans’ benefits, tempers were short. They were all hungry.
J. Edgar Hoover, appointed in 1924 to head of the Bureau of Investigation, told Attorney General Cummings that this unrest was just the beginning. Hoover claimed that 333,000 delegates of “the oppressed people of the Nation” were about to show up in Washington, many of them carrying arms. The young Justice Department bureaucrat, with no experience in the field, was grossly exaggerating. He was trying to hang onto his job and thought that the true-crime detective stories and ingratiating notes he sent over to Louis Howe might not be enough. If Thomas Walsh had lived, he intended to fire Hoover. Cummings was reserving judgment, in part because Harlan Fiske Stone, now on the Supreme Court, arranged for Frankfurter to write Roosevelt recommending that Hoover (a Stone protégé) be retained.
Hoover’s reports on the bonus marchers got FDR’s attention. First, the president ordered the Veterans Administration to set up a camp at Fort Hunt, Virginia, the site of the first CCC camp. The resulting tent city featured electric lights and running water, including showers for the men. FDR drove through the camp and waved his hat at the “bonus boys” but thought something more was necessary. Hoover, who won increased funding for what would soon be a newly restructured “FBI,” was right about one thing: Tension was growing between left-wingers and right-wingers that threatened to split the veterans and break into violence.
While Howe worked with veterans’ representatives to defuse political strife, FDR kept his eye on the simple, symbolic gestures. He instructed Howe to tour the area and make sure the men had plenty of the promised food and shelter—and above all, coffee. “There’s nothing that makes people feel as welcome as a steaming cup of coffee,” Roosevelt told him.
Howe had an idea of who should serve it. One rainy spring afternoon, he asked his old friend Eleanor if she would drive him out to Fort Hunt in her roadster. When they arrived, he told her he would nap in the car and pushed her out into the camp: “Talk to these men, get their gripes and be sure to tell them that Franklin sent you.” Later, the Secret Service would insist that Louis and Eleanor each carry a gun when they traveled without a security escort, but this time, the agents assigned to protect Eleanor were left behind at the White House and she ventured into the camp unarmed and alone.
The Secret Service needn’t have worried. The first lady, warming to her task, mingled winningly with the destitute veterans, talking of France in 1919. Soon they joined her in singing “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail A’Winding,” and other war songs. She visited the makeshift hospital. Here was Eleanor in her new, path-breaking role for a first lady and loving every moment of it. Afterwards, a vet said admiringly in earshot of a reporter: “Hoover sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife.”
That peace could reign in the camps was a surprising accomplishment, a reflection of how the Roosevelts’ charm could soften a policy decision far harsher than Herbert Hoover’s. Ever since the Economy Bill slashed veterans’ benefits by 50 percent in March, members of Congress had been besieged by constituents urging that the cuts be at least partially reversed. Arthur Krock wrote in the Times that “down many main streets go armless veterans who used to get $94 a month from the Government and now get $36.” Suicides among indigent veterans were reported around the country as front-page news. Finally, on May 10, FDR admitted error, acknowledging that the cuts to veterans with service-connected disabilities had been “deeper than originally intended.” The president was hardly a humble man, but he knew the importance of avoiding the impression of infallibility.
To further defuse a volatile situation, Roosevelt and Howe hatched a plan to recruit Bonus Army marchers into the CCC, which was already a quasi-military organization, with Army surplus equipment and clothing, the playing of “Taps,” “Reveille,” and the rest. Here was the wartime metaphor of the Inaugural Address made real, but without the menace of Mussolini or the implied conscription threat of the radio address to the American Legion that FDR had discarded.
In one of the flexible midcourse adjustments he so frequently adopted, FDR waived the CCC’s age requirement (originally eighteen to twenty-five) to allow enrollment of World War I and even Spanish-American War vets at least a decade older. There was plenty of grumbling over the dollar-a-day wage; “to hell with reforestation!” shouted one Bonus Army leader, to cheers. Another said, “It’s like selling yourself into slavery.” But about 25,000 marchers eventually enrolled. Those who didn’t enlist in the CCC left Washington peacefully, their way home paid by a congressional fund. Within a few years, a quarter of a million veterans would serve their country in the CCC.
The bonus marchers who returned for a third time in the summer of 1934 were few in number and yesterday’s news, another example of FDR’s calculated finesse. Late in his life, he pointed with pride to the fact that through all the long years of Depression and war, no major civil unrest took place on his watch. It could easily have been otherwise. The columnist Ernest K. Lindley wrote in 1933 that “Mr. Roosevelt may turn out to be the Kerensky of the Revolution,”* a reflection of elite opinion that FDR’s leadership was too mild to forestall something more violent. In fact, it almost certainly did prevent acts of rebellion. After the CCC was phased out in 1942, a victim of wartime needs, the final government report on the project explained that without the work provided to millions of men, the threat of revolution from the aimless and despairing unemployed might have become real: “They were ready victims for the moral dry rot that accompanies enforced idleness and its resulting dejection. Insidiously, there was spreading abroad in the land the nucleus of those bands of young predators who infested the Russian countryside after the revolution and who became known as ‘wild boys.’ ”
This sounds overheated to modern ears but it reflected legitimate fears at the time. It helps explain why the CCC was the most popular New Deal program. When FDR wanted to cut enrollment to show he was fiscally responsible in his 1936 reelection campaign, he was stymied in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans. Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and a fierce critic of his old Groton schoolmate, loved the CCC. After crime in Chicago dropped by 55 percent, a Chicago judge credited the agency with getting troublesome young men off the streets. Thousands of small businesses located near camps stayed afloat serving the needs of corps members. In the end, FDR’s seemingly impractical brainstorm not only protected the country from unrest and eased suffering, it symbolized the spirit of rebirth and regeneration that he hoped to convey in his early days in office.
The future labor leader, Lane Kirkland, grew up in South Carolina, where the CCC was run by an Army officer named George C. Marshall, one of many distinguished officers in World War II who first served in the “Tree Army” at home. Kirkland later explained what the agency did for his state and region: “The southern U.S. was totally stripped of vegetation. Every river was thick with mud from erosion. Every farm had a gully. And every time it rained, the topsoil just washed away. You go down there now and you see millions of pine trees that are the basis of the timber and pulp industry, planted by the CCC.”
Over nine years, more than 3 million men were given meaningful work. Corps members planted an astonishing 3 billion trees, developed 800 state parks, protected 20 million acres from erosion, and cleared 125,000 miles of trails, including those used for the first downhill skiing in the United States at Stowe, Vermont. (A president who could not use his legs indirectly launched the ski industry.) Perhaps most important, the Civilian Conservation Corps inspired programs over the next several decades such as the Job Corps, Peace Corps, VISTA, and Americorps and thousands of community projects, leaving no doubt that the father of national service in the United States was FDR.
Roosevelt’s point was plain: Government counts, and in the right hands, it can be made to work. Strong federal action, not just private voluntary efforts and the invisible hand of the marketplace, was required to help those stricken in an emergency. The American people expected and deserved leadership in addressing their hardships, not just from state and local authorities but from the White House. This fundamental insight would guide politicians and help millions of people in the years ahead, but it was lost on others, who ignored the lessons of Franklin Roosevelt at their peril.
*Comparisons of eras and presidents are speculative, but if such leadership had been present after September 11, 2001, it’s a fair bet that it would not have taken more than four years for the FBI to fix its computer system and for the government to secure ports and chemical plants against terrorism. FDR would have demanded it be done in, say, four months.
*Robert Jackson, who later served as U.S. Attorney General and went on the Supreme Court, was exasperated by FDR’s administrative sloppiness but recalled how without his impatience and desire to “knock heads together” Washington would have faced many more problems winning World War II.
*Several CCC camps were integrated, which set a precedent that President Truman later used to integrate the U.S. military.
*After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Alexander Kerensky proved too moderate for the Bolsheviks and was supplanted by Vladimir Lenin.