CONSERVATION: Poor Young Men

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Quiet by nature, unobtrusive by preference, Robert Fechner had 'hardly taken hold at CCC before he got into a first-class stink. The Affair of the Toilet Kits in June 1933 concerned a persuasive salesman who got Louis Howe to get Robert Fechner to pay an outrageous price for 200,000 handybags. Although Franklin Roosevelt himself had casually endorsed the salesman, loyal Mr. Fechner took the blows from Congress. That body in 1937 repaid him by cutting his $12,000 salary to $10,000. (Mrs. Norton's bill would restore it to $12,000.)

On his CCC Advisory Council Mr. Fechner has experts representing the four departments (Agriculture, Interior, War, Labor) most concerned with the program. Because Franklin Roosevelt implicitly trusted him, Robert Fechner ran and still runs the show.

Never before has the U. S. had a show like Mr. Fechner's. By statute, its purposes are: 1) to provide employment (plus vocational training), and 2) to conserve and develop "the natural resources of the United States." For this, CCC between April 5, 1933 and December 31, 1938 spent $2,125,000,000. On its rolls had been 2,120,000 men, the number varying widely at various times. A few hard facts show that the U. S. got more for its money from CCC than from most other depression-begotten experiments.

Largely on or near public forest and park lands, CCC by 1938's end had planted 1,456,973,900 trees; put in 8,594,829 man-days at fire fighting & prevention; completed 102,004 miles of trails and roads; killed uncounted millions of prairie dogs, pocket gophers, jackrabbits, practiced "rodent control" on 30,774,000 infested acres; "re-vegetated" (grassed) 267,600 acres of grazing lands; built 41,960 bridges, 5,181 large dams, 3,612 towers and stations for fire lookouts, 68,990 miles of telephone line.

CCC gets off the public domain only by consent of private landowners. Its No. 1 private job: erosion control. The Corps shows community groups of farmers how to combat soil-wastage, has built 4,400,490 dams to check erosion. It also digs and maintains ditches for drainage districts organized by local governments and cooperatives. Today it looks to the 84,400,000 acres of U. S. farm land requiring drainage as one of its most useful future fields of operations.

Happy Days. These prodigious labors (and enough more to fill dozens of close-set-columns in CCC's last annual report) were performed by young men, poor, not gilded. They had to be poor to get in the corps. In fiscal 1938, arrivals at over 1,500 CCCamps included 253,776 needy, unemployed, unmarried "junior enrollees" from 17 to 23; 17,707 war veterans unlimited by age or marital status; 9,500 Indians on Government reservations; 4,800 indigent Territorials in Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Virgin Islands.

According to CCC thinking, the juniors are "the corps." Of them, 66.75% in 1938 came from Relief families; another 29% from families "below a normal or average standard of living"; 3% had no families. Three per cent were completely illiterate;

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