12. The CCC taught many young Americans to read and write
The educational level of the young men who enrolled in the CCC varied widely, with some having little to no education, while others had reached college before financial straits forced them to withdraw. Some arrived at the camp functionally illiterate. Educational initiatives within the camps were at first at the discretion of the camp’s authorities, and in some barracks better educated men began to teach the less fortunate to read and write on their own time. By the late 1930s, formal education classes were offered. During its existence, the CCC taught over 110,000 men who had entered the camps illiterate how to read, how to write, and basic arithmetic, beginning in the first year of existence on a volunteer basis, at the first camp in Virginia.
In 1991, one of the men who arrived at Camp Roosevelt in the first group of men enrolled in the CCC, George Dant, described the early days at the camp. He recalled the dreariness of the camp, then still under construction, and the efforts to alleviate the boredom by the camp’s officers. After a request for books and magazines was sent to authorities, a truckload of books arrived from Washington, donated by libraries, and he was astonished at the voraciousness of those who could read assaulting the books. Most of the books had been donated because they could not pass the libraries’ censors, due to their pornographic nature. “They were almost too educational”, he reported. The books were soon replaced with others deemed more suitable.