A New Deal for Youth:¹ The C.C.C., the N.Y.A., and Liberal Journalism

References

• The title is from Betty Lindley and Ernest Lindley , A New Deal for Youth ( New York : Viking Books , 1938 ), a book on the National Youth Administration.
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• Michael Katz , In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America ( New York : Basic Books , 1986 ), p. 211 . [Chapter 8 , “Reorganizing the Nation,” presents a persuasive assessment of New Deal welfare and relief activities.]
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• John Kazarian , “The Starvation Army,” The Nation 136 ( April 12 , 1933 ): 396 – 398 (April 19, 1933): 443–445; (April 26, 1933): 472–473.
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• David A. Shannon , ed., The Great Depression (Englewood Cliffs , N.J. : Prentice Hall, 1960 ), Part IV, “Nomads of the Depression”; also, Edward Ellis, A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929–1939 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), Chapter 18, “Migrants and the Civilian Conservation Corps.”
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• Page Smith , Redeeming the Time: A People's History of the 1920s and the New Deal ( New York : McGraw-Hill , 1987 ), pp. 439 – 441 Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 77–79; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 336–340.
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• Lindley and Lindley , A New Deal for Youth , p. 13 . For Eleanor Roosevelt's influential role in the creation of the N.Y.A., see Joseph R. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin ( New York : W.W. Norton , 1971 ), Chapter 45 , “The Youth Movement.” Eleanor Roosevelt has given her own interpretation of these events in This I Remember ( New York : Harper , 1949 ), pp. 162 – 163
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• On the influence of the journals, see Beulah Amidon , “ The Nation and The New Republic ,” Survey Graphic 29 ( January 1940 ): 21 , 26 . Richard Pells provides perspective on the liberal journals throughout his book, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). David Seideman explains The New Republic's response to the Depression in The New Republic: A Voice of Modern Liberalism (New York: Praeger, 1986), pp. 95–160.
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• Arthur Schlesinger , Jr. , “Sources of the New Deal,” in Paths of American Thought , eds. Arthur Schlesinger , Jr. , and Morton White ( Boston : Houghton Mifflin , 1963 ), pp. 377 – 381 The other two were Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen, close associates of Croly and Dewey. Beard also wrote many articles for The New Republic. Bruce Bliven, who was managing editor during this period, later wrote in “The First Forty Years,” The New Republic 131 (November 22, 1954): 9: “Nearly all the members of the Roosevelt Brain Trust had been collaborators of the NR before they began to work with President Roosevelt, and most of the ideas of the New Deal first saw the light in its pages.”
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• Jonathan Mitchell , “Roosevelt's Tree Army,” The New Republic 83 ( May 29 , 1935 ): 64 – 66 and 83; (June 12, 1935): 127–129.
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• Ibid. (May 29, 1935 ), p. 64
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• Bob Crandall , quoted by Alan Gibbs in “Institutional History as an Element of Community History: Civilian Conservation Corps in the Okanagan Country,” (Okanagan, Washington: U.S. Forest Service, 1986 ), p. 5 .
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• Ellis , A Nation in Torment , p. 307 .
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• Schlesinger , Coming of the New Deal , p. 340 . An excellent description of the C.C.C. experience is Norman Myers, Letters to Home: Life in the C.C.C. Camps of Douglas County, Oregon, 1933–1934 , ed. Gerald Williams ( Roseburg , Oregon : U.S. Forest Service , 1983 ).
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• George Rawick , “ The New Deal and Youth: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the American Youth Congress ,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1960, p. 47 . The Communists at this time opposed the C.C.C. as a system of “forced labor camps.” See, Harvey Klehr, The Heydey of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 204.
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• “The Peacetime Army ,” editorial, The New Republic 74 ( April 5 , 1933 ): 202 . This issue had gone to press before the actual passage of the bill.
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• Editorial paragraph , The Nation 137 ( November 22 , 1933 ): 581 .
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• Raymond Gram Swing , “Take the Army out of the C.C.C.,” The Nation 141 ( October 23 , 1935 ): 459 .
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• Editorial , The Nation 144 ( May 15 , 1937 ): 551 .
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• David Tyack , Robert Lowe , and Elisabeth Hansot , Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years ( Cambridge , Massachusetts : Harvard University Press , 1984 ), p. 116 .
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• Frances Perkins , The Roosevelt I Knew ( New York : Viking Press , 1946 ), p. 181 .
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• Ibid. , p. 180 .
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• Harry Zeitlin , “ Federal Relations in American Education, 1933–44: A Study of New Deal Efforts and Innovations ,” Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1958, Chapter III. Also Calvin W. Gower, “The Civilian Conservation Corps and American Education: Threat to Local Control?” History of Education Quarterly 7 (Spring 1967): 58–70.
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• Rawick , “ The New Deal and Youth ,” p. 119 .
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• The quotation is from Walter Krah, a C.C.C. veteran interviewed by Judy Caughlin, November 6, 1981 (Vancouver, Washington: Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Oral history tapes). A tape by Charles Nehr (September 30, 1981 ) includes a discussion of work-oriented education: “When you'd take a man from Syracuse, New York, and put him in the woods, you had to train him in everything.” [The author is grateful to Barbara Hollenbeck, Archaeologist/Historian of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, for providing these tapes and other materials on the C.C.C.]
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• Fred Leake and Ray Carter , Roosevelt's Tree Army: A Brief History of the Civilian Conservation Corps (Arlington , Virginia : National Association of C.C.C. Alumni, 1982 ), p. 3 . See, also, Stan Cohen, The Tree Army: A Pictorial History of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942 (Missoula, Montana: Pictorial Histories, 1980), Chapter 7, “Training and Education.”
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• Zeitlin , “ Federal Relations in American Education ,” Chapter III.
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• Editorial paragraph , The Nation 137 ( November 22 , 1933 ): 581 .
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• Swing , “ Take the Army Out of the C.C.C. ,” p. 460 . On Roosevelt's interest in the C.C.C for promoting conservation, see Ellis, A Nation in Torment, pp. 296–307. Caroline Bird notes in The Invisible Scar (New York: Longman, 1966) that the C.C.C. planted a “billion trees, half of all the trees ever planted in the United States” (p. 129).
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• Mitchell , “ Roosevelt's Tree Army. ”
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• Ibid. , (June 12, 1935 ), pp. 127 – 129
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• Ibid.
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• Dorothy Bromley , “They're in the Army Now,” The New Republic 104 ( January 6 , 1941 ): 14 .
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• “Sedition in the C.C.C,” editorial , The New Republic 86 ( February 12 , 1936 ): 7 – 8
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• Bernard Harkness , letter , The Nation 146 ( February 5 , 1938 ): 168 ; Wayne McMillen, letter, The New Republic 74 (March 15, 1933): 132.
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• Editorial paragraph , The Nation 144 ( May 15 , 1937 ): 551 . The Social Frontier, a radical educational journal founded in 1934, shared the concern of the older journals over militarism and censorship in the C.C.C. See George A. Coe, “What Sort of School is a C.C.C. Camp?” The Social Frontier 1 (May 1935): 24–26.
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• Lindley and Lindley , “ A New Democracy in Education ,” Chapter 8 in A New Deal for Youth.
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• Lindley and Lindley , “ These Are Their Stories ,” Chapter 7, Ibid.
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• Dixon Wecter , The Age of the Great Depression ( New York : Macmillan , 1948 ), p. 188 .
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• Smith , Redeeming the Time , p. 823 ; Wecter, The Age of the Great Depression, pp. 187–188. For a thorough study of the N.Y.A. up to 1938, see Lindley and Lindley, A New Deal for Youth. Searle Charles places the N. Y. A. in the context of the whole relief effort in Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1963), pp. 152–154.
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• Zeitlin , “Federal Relations in American Education,” pp. 201 – 214 Edward Krug describes the struggle between public school educators and New Deal educational programs in The Shaping of the American High School: 1920–1941 ( Madison , Wisconsin : University of Wisconsin , 1972 ), Chapter 12 . Also see Gower, “The Civilian Conservation Corps.”
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• Editorial paragraph , The Nation 141 ( June 10 , 1935 ): 30 .
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• Editorial paragraph , The New Republic 83 ( June 10 , 1935 ): 234 . See also “Our Noble Educators,” editorial, The Nation 141 (June 17, 1935): 61–62, which applauded the government's decision to spend N.Y.A. funds through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration instead of the National Education Association.
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• Jonathan Mitchell , “Without Work Experience,” The New Republic 85 ( January 22 , 1936 ): 307 .
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• T.R.B. , “ Washington Notes ,” The New Republic 86 ( May 6 , 1936 ): 366 – 367 The column was written at this time by Jonathan Mitchell. For the origin and history of this well-known column, see Bruce Bliven, Five Million Words Later (New York: John Day, 1970), pp. 170–171; also Seideman, The New Republic, pp. 82–83.
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• John Chamberlain , “Self-Help and Government Aid,” The New Republic 95 ( June 27 , 1938 ): 338 .
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• “Training for Defense,” editorial , The New Republic 104 ( April 21 , 1941 ): 520 .
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• Wecter , The Age of the Great Depression , pp. 188.
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• William James , The Moral Equivalent of War ( New York : International Conciliation , 1910 ).
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• Editorial paragraph , The Nation 142 ( April 1 , 1936 ): 399 .
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• William Mangold , “On the Labor Front,” The New Republic 83 ( June 217 , 1935 ): 279 . Ivar Berg made a similar point in Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 191; also Eli Ginzberg's foreword to Berg, p. xiv. See also W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, “Education and the Labor Market: Recycling the Youth Program,” in Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocalionalism in American Education, eds. Harvey Kantor and David Tyack (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1982), Chapter 5.
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• Mitchell , “ Without Work Experience. ”
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• For the larger dimensions of this feud see Robert Sherwood , Roosevelt and Hopkins ( New York : Harper , 1955 ), pp. 78 – 79
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• Mitchell , “ Without Work Experience ,” 306–308.
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• Ruth Benedict , “Our Last Minority: Youth,” The New Republic 104 ( February 24 , 1941 ): 271 – 272 [Krug draws on this article in The Shaping of the American High School , pp. 328–329.]
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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