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The Success and Contradictions of New Deal Democratic Populism:

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/goodsociety.21.2.0250

1538-9731

Melissa Bass,

Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

Between 1933 and 1942, nearly three million unemployed young men worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to rehabilitate, protect, and build America's natural resources—planting trees, building dams, forging trails, fighting fires, preventing floods and more. Enrollees lived in forest camps, and in exchange for their labor received education and job training, room and board, and $30 per month—about $530 per month in today's dollars—most of which was sent home to support their families. The CCC widely was considered an environmental and social success, in Roosevelt's words, “conserving not only our natural resources, but our human resources” as well.1 But the question remains as to whether it was a democratic or populist success, as understood in this volume. In other words, in the process of providing and accomplishing useful work, did it engage its participants as citizens or build their capacity to act as citizens in our democracy? If a program must be democratic in itself to further democratic ends, then the answer is no. There was much in the CCC that was exclusionary and authoritarian. However, I will make the case that as structured the CCC still was able to accomplish democratic goals and on the whole should be considered a democratic success. In some instances, the CCC's lack of internal democracy was a lost opportunity to accomplish even more. In other cases however, more internal democracy likely would have undermined its substantial democratic contributions.There are many ways in which the CCC could have been democratic but arguably or in fact was not, for a range of reasons. To the extent that inclusion and diversity are hallmarks of democracy, the CCC fell far short, choosing its participants by sex and class, and then segregating them by race, age, and location. Given the nature of the CCC's work and gender-role expectations of the times, the program excluded the entire female half the population out of hand. As a relief program, it also limited enrollment to the poor. Given the huge numbers in need, spending scarce funds on those with means was politically untenable, but this did mean that the CCC would not be a vehicle for bringing the rich, the poor, and those in-between together for a shared purpose. Unwilling to challenge social norms, the program ran separate camps for blacks, whites, and Native American Indians, as well as separate camps for “junior” (young adult) enrollees and older military veterans. Focused on forest-based conservation work, it further segregated enrollees from society at large, placing them in wilderness camps far from their home communities—or any established community. Thus any civic lessons enrollees might learn had to be portable; they neither would be developed nor practiced in places where enrollees had or could have roots and long-term relationships. Short-term, with radio often out of range, the program's major academic researchers of the day, Holland and Hill, concluded that the typical enrollee “tend[ed] to think less and hear less about public affairs than he did before.”2Given that it was a work program, one important way that the CCC could have been democratic was in how it chose and organized its work. Enrollees, the “local experienced men” who supervised their work, nearby community-members, and CCC officials jointly could have determined an area's top conservation priorities and then created work projects to meet these needs. Instead, projects were determined in top-down fashion, with no enrollee or local resident input. While this does not seem to have resulted in enrollees doing good work on the wrong things—there were few complaints about work project choice (or anything else) from those in affected areas—it did leave those most affected without any say in the matter. Further, enrollees and supervisors jointly could have determined what needed to be done, when, and how on a project, giving enrollees practice with a range of civic skills from negotiating to planning. But again, these decisions, in un-populist fashion, were left to the professional supervisors.While the main focus of the CCC was its work program, given a 40-hour work week enrollees actually spent more time in camp than on the job. As a residential program, the CCC had the potential to foster democratic habits and skills, with “every effort made to derive from [camp] life and activities … those training values which go to strengthen and improve the individual as a citizen in a democracy.”3 However, there were clear limits to this, also by design: The CCC's camps were run by the U.S. Army, an institution based more on obedience to authority than on challenging or determining it. As a result, “helping to make better citizens” was often understood to happen through things like the “emphasis placed on cleanliness [and] good order.”4 Certainly, all camps had enrollee leaders (chosen by camp administrators), many had “safety sentinels,” recreation committees, and discussion groups, and some had camp advisory councils.5 However, any enrollee input was circumscribed by Army rule. In 1935, Hill found that camp commanders tended to “discourage frank discussion” out of “an almost panicky fear of ‘agitators;’”6 years later he came across one who had enthusiastically established an enrollee council, only to abolish it when enrollees proposed “changing camp regulations to permit two recreational trips to town a week instead of one.”7 Camp commanders were generally more comfortable promoting citizenship through requisite twice-daily flag tributes and by reminding enrollees of their future civic responsibilities in camp assemblies.8Given that the Army oversaw the camps' formal education programs as well, such limits also extended to the CCC's civics classes and were exacerbated by curricula geared more toward young children than young adults. For example, Once in a Lifetime: A Guide to the CCC Camp presented a strongly populist view of government and citizenship, but overly simplistic and directive: “Don't kid yourself into thinking you are not important. Everyone is important in a democracy.”9 “You[,] who have been given such a break by the Government, which is sincerely interested in your well-being, ought especially to feel civic-minded.”10 Given that the CCC put so few resources into educational supplies—just 35 cents per year per enrollee11—it is possible that it was simply getting what it paid for.In any case, Holland and Hill concluded that as a result enrollees “will not usually have acquired from camp living or camp education a deeper understanding of American democracy,” most importantly because the CCC was “attempting to teach the principles of democracy within an authoritarian atmosphere.”12 Subsequent scholars have concurred.13 Combined with the CCC's democratic deficits related to selection and placement and in its work program, the case against the CCC as a positive force for democratic citizenship appears strong.So what is the counter-case in defense of the CCC? To a great extent critics fail to recognize important ways in which the CCC contributed to democracy, often not recognizing that programs need not necessarily be democratic in themselves to further democratic goals, and that the knowledge, skills, and beliefs necessary for democracy may not be exclusive to democracy.In lamenting the CCC's lack of diversity, critics disregard the extent to which the program did bridge differences, especially given the context of the times. Although all poor during the Great Depression, enrollees grew up in varying economic circumstances: The depression not only had exacerbated existing poverty, it introduced many to it. The Once in a Lifetime CCC guidebook included sample enrollee life stories, and while not statistically representative, they are instructive: the small town, middle class boy whose father lost his job, the poor city youth with struggling immigrant parents, the rich suburbanite whose father's brokerage firm had failed, the young “man of the house” who supported his mother and siblings.14 A broader perspective reveals what the CCC's means-test and the depression itself served to mask: at least some degree of social diversity and class-mixing. This was supplemented by much greater geographic diversity. As one CCC alumnus remembered, “[F]arm boys, city boys, mountain boys, all worked together. I was a farm kid. I didn't know how other people lived or what other people thought about the world. In the CCC we didn't have a choice, we had to work together and get to know each other.”15 By focusing only on the drawbacks of moving participants from their home communities to isolated forest camps, critics fail to acknowledge the civic benefits: In the days before cross-country travel was common and national media ubiquitous, for many enrollees the CCC “was often … their first exposure to life beyond home, farm, [and] village.”16 While cutting enrollees off from the wider world in some respects, in others ways it introduced them to it.CCC camp life also had democratic strengths as well as weaknesses. While unfortunately leery of enrollee councils that might challenge their authority, Army administrators encouraged less “political” activities like hobby clubs and sports teams. Because these groups did not have a say in camp governance, critics largely dismissed the CCC's framing of these as the “constructive recreational activities” portion of the CCC's “program of citizenship improvement,” as empty rhetoric.17 However, enrollees, many with no Boy Scout, 4-H, or similar experience,18 became “joiners,”19 and ultimately members of what Robert Putnam identifies as America's “civic generation.”20 Because youth involvement helps predict adult activity,21 which in turn contributes to democracy,22 the CCC's recreation program may have been as civically significant as intended.The CCC's education program also had democratic strengths in addition to its notable weaknesses. While the CCC's direct efforts at civic education likely came to little, education for democracy is not limited to this. Despite limited and restricted use of funds, by 1939 approximately 75,000 illiterate enrollees had learned to read and another 700,000 enrollees had furthered their education.23 Given the strong connection between education and civic engagement,24 the democratic benefits of the academic program in general were significant. And even the lack of funds could be turned to an advantage: For example, when the program prohibited use of CCC funds for constructing schoolrooms, camps built them on their own; and as Hill observed, “There is something about a schoolhouse built by boys who want it that makes [teachers] and officers throw their bodies protectively before its crude walls.”25 It also forced teachers to look outward for book donations, volunteer instructors, and access to community buildings and equipment, strengthening community-camp relations. As one camp teacher saw it: “the camp and the community should exchange benefits.…. If we have the use of high school buildings, we open our first aid and swimming classes to … [local] students.”26 This also raises the question about the extent to which CCC enrollees were cut off from local communities, as opposed to engaged with them.Further, and most importantly, by focusing on camp governance and civics instruction as the most important ways that the CCC could give enrollees experience with and knowledge about democratic governance, critics fail to recognize how enrollees' actual experience with the CCC as a government program, created through our democracy, could serve these purposes. Critics in large part ignore these lessons because they are not inherently democratic. However, our democracy certainly could not function well in their absence. These lessons included a faith in democratic government, a sense of working with government, and most centrally the understanding that they were contributing to the country through their work, work in this case that was organized by the government.One month after the CCC's creation, the program's director told Americans that “the President believes that one of his major responsibilities is to … instill in [citizens] a greater faith in our government and in its sincere efforts to end the depression.”27 With over one-third of the nation's 15 million unemployed under age 2528 and their commitment to America's system of government not yet cemented by experience, young adults were especially likely to have their faith tested. The potential consequences of a “generation lost” were not lost on New Deal policymakers, and the CCC was one result. While hardly representative, what enrollee James Kidwell wrote in 1935 shows the effect the program could have: “As a citizen I am transformed. Government is a hateful thing to a bum. In his misshapen vision it is a hateful monster that denies his inherent rights. But, behold, the Government has remembered me. It has given me a job, a world of comforts and many luxuries … [M]y old radical tendencies are being replaced by the stirrings of … good citizenship.”29 Another put it more simply:“[W]hen a man looks under his cot and sees two good pairs of shoes, procures three wholesome meals a day, and can go down to the doctor every time he has a stomach ache, it's pretty hard to make himself believe that they are going to junk the Statue of Liberty.”30 More simply still, in interviewing aging CCC alumni decades later, Jackson found that they had been “grateful for the chance.”31Of course, there is nothing inherently democratic about a government providing for its people, yet in the American context, if youth turn against government, they are turning against democratic government. However, more democratic was the sense that together participants and the government could address the nation's severe challenges. As expressed by enrollee Allen Cook, the CCC “was not only a chance to help support my family, but to do something bigger—to help on to success this part of the President's daring new plan to down Old Man Depression”32—while tackling some of the most serious environmental problems of the Dust Bowl era. This sense of joint effort and reciprocity made the CCC more democratic than even some other New Deal relief efforts. As one enrollee recalled first entering the mess hall: “I could not restrain myself from comparing this to the notoriously famous soup line. But what a contrast; there were no downcast faces here.”33 Another summed it up well: “I feel I have given value for dollars received, and that I am again of use to the country.”34 CCC enrollees were not just impoverished youth benefitting from government largess; they were capable citizens contributing to the public good.As a consequence, work was not just the central defining aspect of the CCC experience; it was also the central defining aspect of CCC experience for democracy. Critics will argue that work in itself is hardly democratic; non-democratic regimes everywhere put their citizens to work for their nations' benefit. But again, even for democracies, citizens' public work is nonetheless still necessary—and CCC enrollees did an enormous amount of it. In 1937 for example, enrollees planted 365,233,500 trees, built 1,081,931 check dams, and laid more than 9,960 miles of telephone lines, and these were just three major types of work among over 150.35 The kind and quantity of enrollees' work had strong and lasting civic implications. In 1935 Frank Hill wrote: “The impact of actual work seen is startling…. Many a World War [I] veteran may … wonder if he actually helped make the world safe for Democracy. But no enrollee can doubt the contribution of his peace-time army has been tangible.”36 Later the praise deepened, as when a high school counselor wrote: “The CCC enrollees feel a part-ownership as citizens in the forest that they have seen improve through the labor of their hands.”37 Finally, there were the enrollees' views themselves, summed up simply and powerfully by former enrollee Harry Dallas: “There was pride in the work. We built something, and I knew I helped and saw the result. It was something you could take pride in, and there wasn't a lot of pride available in those days.”38 Only by completely disregarding the civic and educative nature of enrollees' work could Holland and Hill argue that the CCC failed to develop enrollees' “contributing” citizenship skills. They were learning to be contributing citizens by being contributing citizens.In short, critics of the CCC as a program for democracy fall short in their assessment of its effect by taking too narrow a view. They do so not only when analyzing its effects on enrollees, but by only analyzing its effects on enrollees. At a time when the crisis of confidence was as severe as the crises afflicting the economy and environment, the belief that citizens and government together could prevail became a shared, public good. The CCC's enrollees set an example, showing the public at large that even downtrodden youth could be capable citizens. In FDR's words, the CCC's “moral and spiritual value [accrued] not only to those … who [were] taking part, but to the rest of the country as well.”39 The CCC's moral and spiritual value was also its democratic value.One might concede that the CCC made some contribution to democracy, but argue that it certainly would have done much better had it been more democratic in itself. For example, there was nothing preventing Army commanders from engaging enrollees in collective self-governance, and some did. Evidence shows that camps that provided enrollees with even limited opportunities for democratic engagement reaped benefits in terms of enrollee retention and satisfaction.40 However, assuming that more democracy always would have led to greater democratic outcomes presumes that adding democratic elements only would have provided benefits, without incurring any costs. So what if the CCC had tried to be more democratic by being gender-inclusive and local community-based, with work projects appropriate—or at least seen as appropriate given the times—to a broader set of participants and settings? To an extent we know the answer because there was such a program, the National Youth Administration. While successful in its own right, as a part-time, non-residential program the civic benefits its participants gained were certainly different from those of the CCC and arguably much weaker.Given the role Army administration played in undermining CCC democracy in the camps, what if the camps had been run by civilian authorities? In fact, the original plan had been for the Department of Agriculture to administer the camps; the problem was that USDA officials had no experience managing men and materiel on any scale, let alone providing room, board, and services to over a quarter of a million young men, in scattered remote locations, on a three month deadline. Only the Army had the experience to do that. A USDA-run program likely would have been less authoritarian, but also smaller, slower, and more error-prone as the department underwent its own version of “on the job training.” This mix would have altered the CCC's civic outcomes without necessarily increasing them, and potentially reducing them.What if the CCC had tried to go the full democratic distance, creating a non-Army-run, self-governing “leadership training” camp with participants of both sexes, from all classes, whose work would be determined jointly with the local community? In fact, in 1941 a group of college educated youth, advised by a sociologist who had helped set up the early, Weimar Republic work camps, organized such an experimental CCC camp—Camp William James.41 Despite solid presidential and USDA support, the camp floundered due to internal conflicts and external political challenges, and closed as a government-supported CCC camp within two months and as an independent venture within a year. The experiment was certainly not a fair test of the CCC's potential to operate democratically: the camp still had to abide by government rules contrary to its goals, creating irresolvable and ultimately destructive tensions. But it does highlight the challenges of creating a fully democratic government program that is simultaneously successful enough to accomplish other democratic outcomes.As witnessed through the thousands of markers commemorating the work of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps in state and national parks throughout the country, the CCC's environmental legacy has been publicly acknowledged, lasting, and largely uncontroversial. Its democratic legacy has been much less clear and more contested, assumed by some, dismissed by others, and forgotten by most. Assessing how and to what extent the Civilian Conservation Corps acted as a populist force, engaging its participants as citizens and building their civic capacity, challenges our understanding of the relationship between democratic means and ends. Those who disregard the former lose the opportunity to think critically about how the CCC, and by extension contemporary youth conservation corps and national service programs, could do more for democracy by being more democratic. However, the greater problem has been among those who focus so much on the former that they lose sight of the latter—the extent to which, its democratic failings and all, the Civilian Conservation Corps was able to give its participants and the larger public a strong sense that everyday citizens, in partnership with government, could strengthen our democracy in the process of improving our land.