It was just nine years and three months after the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps on March 31, 1933, that the corps ceased active operation. The final decision to liquidate the CCC was made on June 30, 1942, when Congress enacted the Labor-Federal Security Administration Appropriation Act for the fiscal year 1943. Enacting that supply bill, Congress voted to terminate the CCC and set aside eight million dollars to defray the cost of liquidation. As soon as the bill was signed by the president, directives went out to the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and War, and to the Veterans' Administration to proceed as rapidly as possible and complete the process by July 1, 1943. All during the fiscal year 1942 the CCC had been cut back; camps were abandoned when the jobs begun earlier were completed. By the close of the fiscal year, June 30, 1942, there were only about 350 camps left in operation.

But the CCC was still in charge of some 1,400 closed camps, each containing an average of 20 buildings. It also owned over 35,000 pieces of automotive equipment, mostly trucks and tractors, and vast quantities of other materials including large stocks of woolens, cotton, foodstuffs, portable buildings, motor equipment, replacement parts, tires—in fact nearly everything needed to run a program the size of the CCC. The congressional act that terminated the CCC stipulated that the War Department, the Navy Department, and the Civil Aeronautics Administration had first choice of all CCC properties and materials. The worst part of the liquidation process was that the men who were in charge of all this equipment and material were leaving so rapidly. The armed services were organizing and expanding for the war effort, and many of the CCC men were answering the call to duty. Not only were the officers being recalled from their assignments as camp commanders, but many of the technical work supervisors were being offered commissions. The CCC boys who had been well trained in automotive equipment were, upon entering the services, made specialists in the noncommissioned ranks.

Some time in December, 1941, in response to a request from the military, the CCC director approved assigning national-defense projects to camps on military reservations. By the first of the year 70 of the camps assigned to the various technical agencies either had relocated on military reservations or had their manpower there. The technical agencies continued to perform management functions in order to relieve the military of that additional work. Later the director, with the approval of the president, established a CCC victory war program whereby all CCC agencies cooperated with the army in every way possible. By the end of May, 1942, there were approximately 175 camps located on military reservations, and by late June the CCC was devoted completely to war-related projects. Whole camp companies and their heavy equipment were taken over by the army and sent to Canada and Alaska to work on construction of the Alcan Highway. Later the secretary of war publicly complimented the CCC on the part it played in the prosecution of the war effort, stating that the enrollees were "hardened physically, have learned to live together as a Company in barracks, have respect for authority, and are potential soldiers of high caliber."

Thus ended one of the great conservation programs in the history of the United States. The National Park Service had directed the work programs of CCC camps on areas administered by the service; it also had been in charge of recreation-oriented camps on Tennessee Valley Authority lands, in state, county, and metropolitan parks throughout the continental United States, and in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands. The work projects were designed primarily to protect and conserve exceptional natural resources and to develop park and recreation areas for public benefit.

During the entire period of the program—from April, 1933, through June, 1942—work was undertaken by the National Park Service on a total of 655 parks and related types of recreation areas, broken down as follows: national park areas, 71; recreational demonstration areas, 23; TVA areas, 8; federal defense areas, 29; state parks, 405; county parks, 42; metropolitan parks, 75; and 2 areas not classified above, on the West Point Military Academy reservation, in New York, and on Battery Cove Federal Reservation, in Virginia. The service supervised a total of approximately 3,350 camp years, or some 580,000 man years (including camp foremen) of work. Of this work about 25 per cent was on National Park Service areas and 75 per cent on other park and recreation areas. At the peak of the program, in 1935, there were 115 camps assigned to national park areas and 475 to other areas.

In the following table are statistics on a few of the types of work projects undertaken by the CCC from 1933 to 1943.

The amount of money expended by the service totaled $130,504,000. It must be kept in mind, however, that the overhead expenditures reflected only about 25 per cent of the total, because housing, feeding, medical care, clothing, and education of the enrollees and army officers' salaries were expenditures paid from CCC funds allotted to the army. Consequently, the total expenditures for camps under National Park Service supervision amounted to approximately $467,100,000. Of this amount, $132,100,000 went to camps on national park system properties; the balance of $335,000,000 went to camps working on state and metropolitan parks and other recreation areas under National Park Service supervision.

Cost of the CCC for the Fiscal Year 1939

How much did the CCC program cost, and how many boys went through the CCC? On the basis of the CCC director's report for one fiscal year, 1939, I'll try to give a reasonable answer.

The average daily strength of the camps for fiscal year 1939 was 156 boys, giving a total strength of 234,000 boys (156 x 1,500). The table on page 127 shows a total of 16,935 camp years, or 203,220 camp months, for the entire CCC program. The records show that the average enrollment of a CCC boy was nine months, and the overall average number of enrollees per camp was 160. So, by dividing the 203,220 camp months by 9 x 160, we find that the total enrollment was in the neighborhood of 3,612,800 men. My records show the total cost to be around $2,780,000,000 or about $770 per average nine-month enrollee, or $1,025 per enrollment year. The actual cost in the beginning was a little less than $900 per enrollee year, but by the time the program was closing out the cost was in the neighborhood of $1,400 per enrollment year.

On June 30, 1942, the Department of the Interior was operating 114 active CCC camps in the continental United States, in addition to 41 CCC projects on 80 Indian reservations and camps in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, and had on hand approximately $17 million worth of construction and other operating equipment. The closing of camps involved leaving the unfinished work projects in the best possible shape; terminating around 1,800 employees; transferring CCC property to the army, navy, and other agencies; and preparing final accountability records. By June 30, 1943, the liquidation of the CCC was virtually completed. The Interior Department had approximately $1.5 million left of the $8 million appropriated for terminating the program. In order to take care of the final stages of CCC liquidation, Congress appropriated $20,000 to the Federal Security Agency for the 1944 fiscal year. No funds from this appropriation were alloted to the Department of the Interior. I informed the secretary that there was still work to be done and that I was planning to continue discharging the duties of departmental representative until June 30, 1944, but would submit my final report on the interior CCC program by January, 1944.

Cost Per Camp and Enrollee, Fiscal Year 1939

Included in my report was a statement of the accomplishments of the CCC camps prepared by each bureau of the department that had camps assigned to it, and all the bureaus preferred to tell in their own way the accomplishments of their camps. Although the statements of the several bureaus are not included here, the tables on pages 148 and 149 show the extent of their participation and how the distribution of camps in the Interior Department compared with that in the Agriculture Department.

Civilian Conservation Corps, Department of the Interior—Number of Appointive Personnel Employed

Civilian Conservation Corps, Department of the Interior—Total Camp Months of CCC Operations

Distribution of Standard CCC Camps in Continental United States