Bradshaw
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s first and most successful relief programs during the Great Depression, flourished in Louisiana between 1933 and 1942, even though Huey Long vehemently opposed it.
Roosevelt proposed its creation in March 1933. The idea was to place able-bodied young men in camps across the country to do the manual labor needed for development of natural resources. It sailed through Congress, and the first camps were formed in April 1933.
The first projects were aimed mostly at planting saplings on public land, but Long, then a U.S. Senator and a staunch Roosevelt foe, wanted nothing to do with them. He was afraid the work program would give FDR too much political clout and cut into the Long machine’s hold over Louisiana. Long said he would personally “eat every one of them that comes up in my state.”
He would have had to do a lot of eating. The camps came to Louisiana despite his tirade, and workers planted thousands of trees in Kisatchie National Forest, which spreads over much of central and north Louisiana.
Workers on south Louisiana’s prairie lands tackled other jobs. Several hundred men worked from late 1933 into the middle of 1934 to build the Longfellow- Evangeline State Park at St. Martinville, and those based in Ville Platte helped create Chicot State Park.
Other south Louisiana camps were set up at Lafayette, Abbeville, Jeanerette, Krotz Springs, Church Point, Hackberry, Iowa, and Bunkie. Most of them lasted only for months, not years. They moved elsewhere when their projects were done. According to an Abbeville Meridional story, CCC workers in Vermilion Parish worked to “clear and grub rights-of-way for large ditches, remove vegetation from existing ditches … and clean, straighten and deepen old ditches.”
Bradshaw
The program gave work and money to men who had few other options. They were fed and housed at government expense and paid $30 a month, $22 of which was sent home to help support their families. That $30 would be the equivalent of about $350 today.
The camps were also a boon to the communities where they were located. The Meridional said in December 1939 that the one there, “with its approximately 200 enrollees and officers” was an “important asset” to the town and parish. During five months of operation, the CCC spent $2,000 repairing buildings and nearly $1,700 for general expenses, most of that going into the local economy, according to the story.
“The electric costs average $75 per month, the ice bill averages $45 a month, shoe repair about $35 per month, gasoline and oil for the company truck … totals about 250 gallons of gasoline and three gallons of oil a month,” the newspaper said. Gasoline cost less than 20 cents a gallon back then, oil even less.
The camps included housing, a recreation hall, infirmary, and other facilities (usually in large tents), but one young worker from Crowley said in a letter home that the “most welcome spot” in his camp was the mess hall. “The gain of weight by the majority of the members” attested to “the quality and quantity of the food served,” he said. That appeared to be just as true in Abbeville.
The Meridional itemized $9,800 spent by the CCC on food for just five months. The list included 15,000 packages of cereal, 16,700 pints of milk, 10,000 pounds of potatoes, 10,000 pounds of rice, 1,000 pounds of chicken, 700 pounds of beef, 500 pounds of bacon, 10,000 pounds of flour, 3,000 pounds of lard and 700 of butter, 1,000 pounds of frankfurters, and 800 gallons of ice cream, as well as coffee, sugar and other staples.
Some of the enrollees were trained as cooks and bakers to handle all of that food, and the camps also taught job skills the workers could use after leaving the program.
Besides cooking and baking, the Abbeville camp offered basic courses in reading and writing, as well as things as varied as stenography, dynamiting, auto mechanics, radio repairs, surveying, mechanical drawing, woodworking, and a list of construction skills.
A. E. Johnson, the state coordinator for the CCC, said in 1939 that besides giving them immediate financial relief, the camps were “teaching young American men useful trades, building their health and character and capacity for civilian leadership,” in contrast to programs in an increasingly troubled Europe, where “young men … are being taught the latest methods of legalized, scientific murder.”
Unfortunately, that would not last. We were dragged into those faraway troubles in 1941, and Congress did away with the CCC just months later because the camps were empty. Most of those healthy, hardworking, trained young men were using their skills doing much more disagreeable and dangerous work.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
