The same day, April 5, that the CCC Advisory Council was established, the War Department informed the commanding generals of the corps areas that the Department of Labor would be responsible for the selection of the CCC candidates; that the initial national enrollment would be twenty-five thousand unmarried men ages eighteen to twenty-five with dependent immediate relatives, prorated among seven corps areas; that each corps area would be responsible for taking over the men from the selecting agency, making preliminary physical and mental examinations of the applicants, transporting accepted enrollees to designated camps, making further physical examination, and transporting rejectees back to points of acceptance; and that each corps area would control and allocate housing, food, clothing, equipment, medical care, and authorized allowances. It further stated that the primary mission of the army was to organize the members of the CCC into self-sustaining units for future work, to carry out physical conditioning, and to maintain high morale.

Also on April 5 a meeting of the representatives of established unemployment relief organizations in the sixteen cities from which the first twenty-five thousand men were to be selected was called by the Department of Labor to discuss organization plans and policies. These representatives agreed to assume the responsibility for selection and start such action the following day. On April 6 the first public announcement by the director of the CCC outlined the proposed program, and the selection process began in the designated cities. The press also stated that Horace Albright would be Secretary Ickes's representative on the council.

On April 8, R. Y. Stuart, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, sent a memorandum to Howe at the White House describing a method of operation, which he stated was concurred in by Albright of the Interior Department, that they felt would meet the president's desire to have certain activities of the camps handled by the army. The memorandum recommended that the army transport the men to the camps, feed them, clothe them, provide education, and take care of the incidental expenses of the operation of the camps, but that the agencies for which the camps worked be given full control over the boys during the workday. This arrangement would provide good training for a large number of army officers, especially in the junior grades up through the rank of major. Since the armed forces were very short of funds, the CCC would reimburse the army for their salaries.

On April 10 the secretary of the interior issued an order officially appointing Director Albright of the Park Service as the department's representative on the CCC Advisory Council. The associate director of the Park Service, Thomas Havell, of the General Land Office, and J. P. Kenney, director of forestry for the Indian Service, were designated alternates. The chief staff officer, as previously decided, was to be John Coffman. Just about this time the director of the CCC, Bob Fechner, in consultation with representatives of interior, agriculture, and war, established regional coordinators, using Forest Service people with headquarters established in the various army corps areas, to represent and coordinate the interests of all CCC agencies.

April 10 was the big day of reckoning between the representatives of the four departments on the CCC Advisory Council. Practically the whole day was taken up with meetings that lasted into the night. The morning was devoted to reviewing memorandums by the various bureaus of the departments in preparation for a meeting of the department representatives with Howe at the White House executive offices at three o'clock that afternoon. The purpose of that meeting was to try to straighten out many things that were in conflict between the departments, and it was very successful, although Fechner was ill and could not attend. It was understood that Howe was going to keep out of the picture as much as possible now and turn the full responsibility over to Fechner, who would report directly to the president. The technical agencies were going to run the work, and the army was going to run the camps.

The president had agreed, according to Howe, that a military officer would be normally the head of a camp. But there was to be no interference, direction, or suggestion from the military as to what work should be assigned the enrollees. Howe stated that when the work agencies took charge at the work hour the men were to be under the orders of the representatives of those agencies until they were back in camp. The technical agencies were to help the military in providing off-work activities for the boys and cooperate and help in every way they could. The money would be handled by the military, and the army paymaster would make all payments for both the technical agencies and the army through a voucher system. Howe also made it clear that the army could use some of the camps on their own reservations for forestry work but not for any other purpose. He announced that the president had approved, on the previous Saturday, April 8, some 107 camps located in the eastern part of the United States. The Forest Service people were also told that the president hoped that service would be able to get some of the money back for work done on state forests but nothing was mentioned about state parks. The Forest Service told Howe this was almost impossible to do, but he told them to try.

After the meeting the technical agencies adjourned to Fechner's hotel room and gave him a rundown on what had taken place. He informed us that he wanted to make all announcements of camps to be established so that there would be uniform procedure and no conflicts. That very day Fechner issued a press release to the effect that the first fifty camp sites had been selected and approved.

While these meetings were going on, Frank A. Kittredge and C. Duncan Montieth, of the National Park Service, were having discussions with Colonel Duncan Major, Jr., who was representing the secretary of war. They couldn't seem to get together on whose jurisdiction the men should be under while they were in the field. In fact the military, through Colonel Major, said there was no alternative but for the army to have full charge of the men at all times. The colonel's position was not in accordance with the understanding outlined by Stuart and Albright to Fechner, which had his approval, nor was it in conformity with what they understood Howe had agreed to when speaking for the president. A meeting was held that evening at eight o'clock with the chief of staff of the army and again this point could not be resolved. After meeting with the chief of staff, the technical people met again and went over their various procedures to see how they could eventually straighten out the army as to jurisdiction over the work program. The technical agencies began to feel that if they didn't have control of the men on the job it would be best for them not to have any camps.

On April 12, Chief Forester R. Y. Stuart wrote a memorandum to Colonel Major:

In accordance with our conversation over the telephone this morning, I submit the following suggested paragraphs for insertion in the instructions prepared by you which were under discussion yesterday in Mr. Fechner's room. This language is believed preferable to that which you proposed last night in that we believe it defines more clearly the exact authority which will rest with the representatives of the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and the States.

The suggested language has been concurred in by the Interior Department through Mr. Kittredge, acting for Mr. Albright:

The Representatives of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, or the State, in charge of the conservation work to be done from the work camp shall fix the daily hours of work, subject to a maximum of eight hours per day, five days per week, except in cases of emergency such as forest fire suppression.

The Departments of Agriculture and Interior, or the State, through their authorized representatives, shall furnish all necessary technical and supervisory force for the direction of the conservation work projects, shall plan and direct the work, and shall have complete and exclusive control of the enrolled men and hired personnel while on and going to and from the work except for such measures as the Army officer in charge of the camp may find it necessary to take in the event of serious breeches of discipline during working hours.

There's a note on the bottom of this memorandum that reads, "O.K.'d by Mr. McEntee for Mr. Fechner, and Col. Major says it coincides with their views (as changed!)." The initials, C.M.G., are those of Chris Granger, assistant chief forester of the U.S. Forest Service, the chief forester's alternate on the CCC Advisory Council and a very highly respected individual.

All during the time these meetings were going on, discussions were hot and heavy over details, many of which are not mentioned here. The information was being fed to the field; responses were coming back into the Washington office; contacts with the states were being established and maintained, offices set up for handling the state work, and staff appointed; and camp application forms were designed, sent to the field, returned with recommendations, and submitted to Fechner for approval. The president had very definite ideas about when he wanted the first camps in operation.

On April 13, in a long letter to the field, Albright pointed out that major changes would have to be made in the work program and consequently in camp locations in order to meet the president's requirements. The Emergency Conservation Work Camps would have two hundred men each, and the available money was to be spent establishing the greatest number of camps possible; therefore the program would have to be revised where necessary to restrict the purchase of expensive equipment in lieu of man power. The camp size required dropping some projects and replacing them with projects that would require two hundred workers for at least a six-month period. It was realized that some trucks would be necessary to transfer workers, but if possible such equipment would be rented locally.

Albright explained that the purchases would be handled through the army paymaster and went on to say that it hadn't been determined whether we could buy our own tools or whether they'd be purchased through the army. What finally happened was that our request went in to the military, and the military did supply a certain amount of material and tools, such as shovels, from their warehouses. But the handles of the shovels and parts of other pieces of equipment they furnished were in a deteriorated condition—it turned out that the tools and equipment came out of the army stockpile left over from World War I—and the army replaced the items using funds from the CCC.

Director Albright's letter to the National Park Service's field people reflected the climate of the time and especially the spirit of the Park Service and those taking part in the CCC program. It conveyed the real underlying principle of the CCC concept.

While this program involves hard work placed on the shoulders of every one of us, a large responsibility and a great deal of hard work, it also permits us to play a very important part in one of the greatest schemes ever devised for the relief of our fellow citizens in this present crisis and the rehabilitation of many young men of the nation who have as yet had no opportunity for decent occupation and have been the subjects of unfortunate attitude toward their native land and conditions in general. We therefore have a wonderful opportunity to play a leading part in the development of a wholesome and patriotic mental attitude in this younger generation.

In my opinion that defines the CCC. The effort was highly successful, and its by-product was one of the best conservation programs this country has ever had.

Albright wrote the secretary of the interior on April 17 urging him to sign a memorandum to the president informing him that compliance with the president's request to finish work at Shenandoah National Park was delayed because the land status had not been clarified. Albright also thought that the president should be informed that it would be almost impossible to continue any great amount of erosion repair work on the public domain land under the jurisdiction of what was known then as the General Land Office, because if erosion prevention structures were built they would need to be maintained. There was need for legislation, such as the Taylor Grazing Bill then before Congress, which would provide funds to undertake a program of this kind.

Another matter the Park Service director felt ought to be reported to the president was that the big coal fires in the public domain presented a very difficult problem. They were destroying vast amounts of good coal resources, but it was doubtful whether the crews of the CCC could successfully combat them. Rather than establishing a lot of camps to work on the fires, Albright proposed assigning a few camps to the coal fires as an experiment to see what could be done. We ended up putting a camp on the subsurface coal fire near Interior, North Dakota. Even with one camp working the entire CCC period, no dent was made in putting out the fire.

A fourth issue that the bureaus of the Interior Department wanted to have brought to the attention of the secretary and the president was their belief that the Indian problem in the CCC was a very difficult one under the program of alloting certain percentages of enrollees to the states. The Indian reservations are sparsely populated sections of the country, and therefore very few of the Indians could be reached under the state CCC quotas. Furthermore, there was a lot of unemployment among the Indians on the reservations, and the supervision of Indian camps ought to be under the Indian Service. To resolve this problem the Indian CCC program was turned over entirely to the Indian Service, which took charge of establishing camps, caring for the enrollees, and employing qualified Indians to plan and supervise the work. The Indian CCC also had its own quota of enrollees.

With the principal exception of those camps on Indian reservations and under the control of the Indian Service, each camp in the states had an officer of the army or navy in charge. He handled all camp matters and was responsible for the enrollees except when they were turned over to the representatives of the bureaus of the Departments of Interior and Agriculture for the purpose of carrying out work projects. The U.S. Forest Service administered the entire CCC program in Alaska and Puerto Rico, and the National Park Service administered it in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands.

One other exception was in effect for two years. Isle Royal National Park was authorized by Congress in March, 1931, and the state of Michigan agreed to acquire the necessary land and donate it to the federal government as a national park. In 1934 we placed two CCC camps there to clean up a lot of fallen trees and trash that had accumulated over the years from timber operations and had become a decided fire hazard. There were also a dozen or so old abandoned buildings left by the timber and fishing interests. The only time the material could be burned without the risk of starting a forest fire was in winter. Because of the difficulty of servicing them during the winter months, the army did not want to operate the Isle Royal camps, and so we asked CCC Director Fechner to turn them over to the National Park Service for two years. We used ski planes to bring in supplies when the ice made it impossible to use boats. The army helped by furnishing the normal supplies and certain services, such as medical care.

In organizing CCC activities in state parks, we had to have some guidance from the president as to how far we could go in cooperating with the states. The question was coming up constantly in that frantic spring of 1933, and it was time to get advice in writing. Therefore, on April 28 the secretary of the interior addressed a memorandum to the CCC director pointing out the importance of state parks, the type of work that would have to be done in them, and how they could contribute to conservation of our natural resources in the same way as the national parks. Then he proceeded to give a list of the proposals that he'd like to have approved. His recommendations were approved by Fechner and the president on April 29.

This approval was a go-ahead signal for the development of the state parks in the United States, something that Steve Mather and Horace Albright had long considered a national need and an objective that they fostered and dreamed of when they established the National Conference on State Parks in 1921. It resulted in creation of many new state parks, the enlargement of existing parks, and the establishment of state park organizations.

In the first part of May, Director Albright offered the services of the national park naturalists and other rangers to the military to help in the CCC training program and in the recreation activities, although as it turned out this help was limited almost entirely to national park camps.

The president had set June 30 as the deadline by which to have 250,000 boys in camps and working. That meant the recruiting, physical examination, and orientation of enrollees, the forming of two-hundred-men units, transporting the units to field location, building camps, employing supervisory personnel, planning work programs, preparing detailed construction plans where needed, and purchasing equipment for at least 1,250 camps scattered throughout the nation on federal, state, county, and metropolitan properties to work on various kinds of conservation projects. The U.S. Forest Service also assigned a considerable number of camps to privately owned forest lands in accordance with their long-range forest protection programs.

On May 5 the CCC Advisory Council met with Fechner in Howe's office. At that time the departmental representatives were worrying about meeting the president's deadline. Howe asked them to submit to Fechner the following day a memorandum of problems that were at the critical point and needed immediate solution. W. Frank Persons, the council member from the Department of Labor, pointed out in his memorandum that as of midnight, May 1, only 1,875 of the 40,486 men accepted at the conditioning camps had been transferred to work camps. He reported that the Labor Department had done its work, having gotten the states to register the prospective CCC enrollees. The states were now complaining that the men were not being called up by the army because their conditioning camps were slow in moving men out to the work camps. Persons wrote:

You will recognize that the organization we have created for the selection of men is a mighty engine of public opinion. It embraces the influential citizens in every township in all of the 48 states. Without exception, so far as I know, these men and women have embraced the opportunity with enthusiasm, and are increasingly gratified that they may have a part in this plan. They are seeking the best available candidates. Naturally, they are interested in these boys. They are likely to manifest very actively any dissatisfaction that they feel is justified, because their implied promises that jobs are soon to be available for the men selected cannot be fulfilled.

He also pointed out that the president, when he submitted the legislation to Congress on March 21, had stated that if approval to go ahead was given within two weeks, he estimated that 250,000 men would be given temporary employment by early summer, meaning June 30. The legislation had been placed on the president's desk on March 31, well within the two-week limit.

The representatives of interior and agriculture wrote Fechner urging that the CCC meet the June 30 goal and stating that the two departments were ready to help the army in the construction of the camps. The army could send out advance cadres of twenty-five to thirty men to the parks and forests and, along with park and forest personnel, put up the camps.

On May 8 the president issued the following executive order on the "Administration of the Emergency Conservation Work":

By virtue of the authority vested in me by the act of Congress entitled "AN ACT For the relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work, and for other purposes, approved March 31, 1933 (Public, No. 5—73d Cong.), and supplementing Executive Order No. 6101, dated April 5, 1933, it is hereby ordered that:

(1) In view of the limitation prescribed by the said act as to the time when the conservation work provided for therein must cease, the Director of the Emergency Conservation Work is hereby authorized, empowered, and directed within the limits of the allotment of funds made to him to complete the establishment of his office in the District of Columbia and to employ such civilian personnel as he may deem necessary for the efficient and economical discharge of his duties.

(2) The Director is also authorized to issue orders for such travel of the personnel of his office as he may deem necessary in connection with the Emergency Conservation Work, the travel orders issued to prescribe a per diem in lieu of subsistence at the rates authorized by the Standardized Government Travel Regulations.

(3) The Director is further authorized to purchase from the Emergency Conservation Fund such supplies, stationery, office fixtures, and equipment as may be required for his office whenever such articles cannot be issued or transferred for his use from stocks of other executive departments or Government establishments in the District of Columbia.

(4) Civilian and military personnel now in the service of the United States will be utilized to the greatest extent possible; but where absolutely necessary to the proper conduct of the work of the Emergency Conservation Corps the Director and the Secretaries of War, Interior, Agriculture, and Labor are hereby authorized, empowered, and directed within the limits of the allotment of funds made to them, to employ in the District of Columbia, or elsewhere, such additional personnel as they deem necessary in connection with the conservation work, without regard to the requirements of the civil-service laws and regulations and the Personnel Classification Act of 1923, as amended. The rates of compensation will be fixed by the Director and the heads of the departments concerned subject to the approval of the President, and subject to the reduction prescribed in the act approved March 20, 1933 (Public, No. 2—73d Cong.), and payment for all such civilian services and the pay and allowances of reserve officers of the Army, including their travel allowances authorized by law, called to active duty for service in connection with the conservation work, shall be made from the Emergency Conservation Fund. A weekly report of all such appointments must be made to the President, giving the rate of compensation in each case.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

The White House
May 8, 1933

There were some "doubting Thomases" who questioned whether the program would be a success or whether it could meet the president's requirements of having all the camps established in accordance with his commitment to Congress; nevertheless spirit was high. There were more optimists than pessimists, and they prevailed.

The workdays were long; they started early in the morning and went late into the night. We had a coffeepot, and one person was detailed to keep it going. We'd take a few breaks and send out for sandwiches for dinner. Saturday was for working, just as any other day. Even Sunday was sometimes a workday, primarily for discussion groups, and sixteen-hour sessions were not uncommon.

The National Park Service's field and Washington staff established to administer state, county, and metropolitan park CCC camps. Left to right, front row: E. A. Pesonen, M. B. Borgeson, C. L. Wirth, H. Evison, H. Maier, R. H. Reixach; middle row: D. B. Alexander, G. Gibbs, F. Hearon, J. H. Gadsby, L. C. Merriam; back row: A. T. Lindstrom, R. E. Weatherwax, P. Brown.

Fechner passed on to the agencies such responsibilities as were necessary for compliance with the executive order and requested in a memorandum of May 10 that they submit to him by May 12 a complete outline of their plans and requirements to accomplish their part of the Emergency Conservation Work goal of putting 274,375 men in camp and at work by July 1. Of special interest was the report Fechner received from the chief forester of the Forest Service, who stated in part:

Mr. Howe has recently expressed disapproval of efforts of others than yourself to expedite essential action at the White House but I doubt whether he understands fully the extent to which delay there has measurable effect on slowing down the entire machinery. For example, the failure to get approval of the rules and regulations governing use of emergency conservation work funds on state and private land projects prevents our expending any money whatever in behalf of the projects which have been approved for these classes of lands. Pennsylvania, which had its camps approved first, is now in the position of having its men in work camps but unable to go out and work because authority has not been extended to purchase tools and cannot be extended until the White House acts.

The CCC caused the author a lot of travel but also gave him a chance to stop by home once in a while to see his father and mother. There was a metropolitan park CCC camp in Minneapolis.

Under the CCC legislation camps were set up on county and municipal properties at the discretion of the president. On May 8 the secretary of the interior asked the director of Emergency Conservation Work for the authority to put camps in the county parks that were closer than state parks to centers of population, where conservation and the development of recreation facilities were highly important. He referred particularly to the Westchester County parks of New York, the Cook County parks of Illinois, and the Milwaukee County parks of Wisconsin, as well as those in the vicinity of Boston, Cleveland, Akron, and other cities.

Just how many camps had been established by June 30 varies according to different reports; the program was on too large a scale and progressed too fast to allow such pinpointing. Fechner's report to the president for the period April 5 through June 30, 1933, is probably the most reliable. It stated:

The selection and enrollment of 250,000 unmarried young men between the ages of 18 and 25 years was initiated at once. On April 7, 1933, the first man was selected and enrolled for C.C.C. work. Ten days later, on April 17, the first 200-man C.C.C. camp was established at Luray, Virginia. Within 3 months the 250,000 young men, together with an additional 25,000 war veterans and 25,000 experienced woodsmen, had been assembled and placed in 1,468 forest and park camps extending to every section of the Union. Since July 1, 1933, the strength of the C.C.C. has averaged about 300,000. The highest strength present on any given date has been 346,000 for the C.C.C. proper and 361,000 for all the forest camps, including Indians and camps allocated to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands.