Civilian Conservation Corps
The Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC was ene of the first measures passed during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Hundred Days. Young men were enrolled as amateur forest rangers, marsh-drainers, and the like, on projects designed to improve the countryside. The recruits were given room and board, clothing, and a dollar a day. More than two and half million of them passed through the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, until the program was abolished in 1942, when the men were needed for the draft. [1]
In 1973, John A. Garraty published an important article on the CCC in the American Historical Review [2] Garraty was Gouverneur Morris Professor of American history at Columbia and later general editor of the American National Biography. Yet, while a warm admirer of FDR, Garraty was compelled to note the striking similarities between the CCC and parallel programs set up by the Nazis for German youth. Both were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth “off the city street corners,” Hitler as a way of keeping them from “rotting helplessly in the streets.” In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. . . . Furthermore, both were organized on semi-military lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.
Garraty listed many other similarities of between the economic planning of the New Deal and National Socialism. Like Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler prided himself on being a “pragmatist” in economic affairs, trying out one panacea after another. Through a multitude of new agencies and mountains of new regulations, both in Germany and America, owners of enterprises found their freedom to make decisions sharply curtailed.
The Nazis encouraged working-class mobility, through vocational training, the democratizing youth camps, and a myriad of youth organizations. They usually favored workers as against employers in industrial disputes and, in another parallel to the New Deal, supported higher agricultural prices. Both FDR and Hitler "tended to romanticize rural life and the virtues of an agricultural existence" and harbored dreams of the rural resettlement of urban populations, which proved disappointing. Characteristically for the collectivist movements of the time, “enormous propaganda campaigns” were mounted in the United States, Germany, Italy and the USSR to fire up enthusiasm for the government’s programs.
It is no wonder, then, as Professor Garraty writes, that “during the first years of the New Deal the German press praised him [Roosevelt] and the New Deal to the skies. . . . Early New Deal policies seemed to the Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer’s.”
References
↑ FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Ralph Raico, Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1, 2001. Retreived from The Independent Institute.org 06/17/07.
↑ The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression, John A. Garraty, American Historical Review, Vol. 78, October 1973.
Retrieved from "http://www.conservapedia.com/Civilian_Conservation_Corps"
In 1973, John A. Garraty published an important article on the CCC in the American Historical Review [2] Garraty was Gouverneur Morris Professor of American history at Columbia and later general editor of the American National Biography. Yet, while a warm admirer of FDR, Garraty was compelled to note the striking similarities between the CCC and parallel programs set up by the Nazis for German youth. Both were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth “off the city street corners,” Hitler as a way of keeping them from “rotting helplessly in the streets.” In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. . . . Furthermore, both were organized on semi-military lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.
Garraty listed many other similarities of between the economic planning of the New Deal and National Socialism. Like Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler prided himself on being a “pragmatist” in economic affairs, trying out one panacea after another. Through a multitude of new agencies and mountains of new regulations, both in Germany and America, owners of enterprises found their freedom to make decisions sharply curtailed.
The Nazis encouraged working-class mobility, through vocational training, the democratizing youth camps, and a myriad of youth organizations. They usually favored workers as against employers in industrial disputes and, in another parallel to the New Deal, supported higher agricultural prices. Both FDR and Hitler "tended to romanticize rural life and the virtues of an agricultural existence" and harbored dreams of the rural resettlement of urban populations, which proved disappointing. Characteristically for the collectivist movements of the time, “enormous propaganda campaigns” were mounted in the United States, Germany, Italy and the USSR to fire up enthusiasm for the government’s programs.
It is no wonder, then, as Professor Garraty writes, that “during the first years of the New Deal the German press praised him [Roosevelt] and the New Deal to the skies. . . . Early New Deal policies seemed to the Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer’s.”
References
↑ FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Ralph Raico, Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1, 2001. Retreived from The Independent Institute.org 06/17/07.
↑ The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression, John A. Garraty, American Historical Review, Vol. 78, October 1973.
Retrieved from "http://www.conservapedia.com/Civilian_Conservation_Corps"
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