How FDR Created Jobs and Saved America’s Natural Treasures through the Civilian Conservation Corps

How FDR Created Jobs and Saved America’s Natural Treasures through the Civilian Conservation Corps

Larry Holzwarth - March 19, 2019

How FDR Created Jobs and Saved America’s Natural Treasures through the Civilian Conservation Corps
CCC projects such as preparing grades for roads ended when Congress ended its funding in 1942. National Archives

18. Congress ceased funding the CCC in 1942

Back in the days when the Congress of the United States passed budgets which followed the fiscal year, expiring on June 30, the 77th Congress decided the CCC was redundant, and funding for its operations ended on that date in 1942. Many of the camps were absorbed by the War and Navy Departments, others by state organizations, and still others were simply abandoned. Congress continued to fund the liquidation of the CCC (resolving and archiving records, establishing the status of incomplete projects, etc.) until 1948, when the process was declared complete. By then FDR was dead and Harry Truman expressed little interest in renewing the agency in peacetime.

Some former CCC camps were expanded during World War II to serve as internment camps for German, Italian, and Japanese nationals who were in the United States when the war began. Others were used to house conscientious objectors, who performed public service projects similar to those of the CCC but on a much smaller scale throughout the war. Other camps were expanded even further as housing facilities for prisoners of war as they began to arrive in the United States, beginning with Germans and Italians captured in North Africa in 1942 (most of the interned Japanese Americans along the west coast were held in camps built by the army).

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