In the late 1930s when war broke out in Europe, production increased in the United States. This created more jobs, which meant that fewer young men were signing up for the Civilian Conservation Corps. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the War Department needed to divert attention to the war, and the CCC came to an official end in 1942.

However, prior to this Congress had been considering making the CCC permanent. So what if WW2 hadn't happened - or broke out later than in OTL - and the CCC was made a permanent public force in the US, kind of like the police or fire-fighting services?
 
The CCC is generally considered the most effective of the WPA type projects. 3,000,000 young men spent time in this program. One result is that there were these 3,000,000 young men who had been in a disciplined work force trained under Reserve Officers who were greatly prepared when they were called up or volunteered in 1941 and later. My Dad, a 1933 Annapolis graduate and career Naval Officer, commanded one of these camps. He said he was a great experience for him as well
 

Driftless

Donor
The CCC's would have been useful public service on several fronts: a worthwhile job in lean times for some - room, board, and a little cash, job training to some extent, and the performance of useful work that can be difficult to budget for. Some of the structures and trails those guys laid out are still in use today (ongoing maintenance of course).
 

Driftless

Donor
The CCC is generally considered the most effective of the WPA type projects. 3,000,000 young men spent time in this program. One result is that there were these 3,000,000 young men who had been in a disciplined work force trained under Reserve Officers who were greatly prepared when they were called up or volunteered in 1941 and later. My Dad, a 1933 Annapolis graduate and career Naval Officer, commanded one of these camps. He said he was a great experience for him as well

I think that leadership piece gets overlooked sometimes. The fellows like your dad got some very useful training in handling large groups of people under difficult circumstances.
 
Gave the military officers some refresher training in mobilizing large numbers of men. The National Guard sumer camps were shrinking in size, as were the active Army exercises. Congress had been drawing down military budgets thus reducing the Great War experience in mass mobilization. Taking on several hundred thousand CCC members & putting them to work was useful experience.

The CCC was drawn down as the mobilization & expansion of the US military to over two million men by early 1941 drew off much of the young men. Industrial employment in the same period provided for the balance.

Since the 1950s there have been assorted programs to reproduce some of the goals or results of the CCC. VISTA of the 1960s & its brief 1990s revival was one such, a number of state and local anti poverty programs have attempted to provide work as a alternative to drug dealing and other crime as a source of income, or otherwise redirect urban youth.
 
Since the 1950s there have been assorted programs to reproduce some of the goals or results of the CCC. VISTA of the 1960s & its brief 1990s revival was one such, a number of state and local anti poverty programs have attempted to provide work as a alternative to drug dealing and other crime as a source of income, or otherwise redirect urban youth.

Yep - a lot of CCC type work is still done through Americorps and similar programs. I spent the summer of 2015 with an Americorps crew on Forest Service land in Idaho and Washington. Some people I worked with were recovering from a rough life, while others felt they needed discipline and training in leadership (myself included). After months living in the backcountry, felling trees and building bridges, I felt like I could accomplish anything - working on a conservation crew was one of the best choices I've ever made. A surviving CCC would provide those leadership opportunities and technical skills to generations of American youth; it would almost certainly be a boost to the economy.

On the other hand, a very large CCC could pose some problems for federal land management: first of all, by having important work done by amateurs rather than career experts, and second, the potential for make-work programs leading to environmentally destructive overmanagement. Our understanding of conservation has evolved dramatically since the 1930s, and many policies of the day are now seen as huge mistakes. For instance, the drastic wildfire suppression measures employed by the Forest Service for most of the 20th century were based on a misunderstanding of wildfire's role in the ecosystem; fires are important in the lifecycle of many conifers, and periodic small fires help prevent huge, stand-destroying fires by cleaning out deadfall and underbrush. Thousands of extra hands on fire suppression duty in the 1950s could make the problem even worse.

Would conservation be considered a national service alternative during times of military draft? Would it be attacked during the Cold War as a Communist relic? Would an alternate counterculture or environmental movement decry it for militarizing and manicuring the wilderness? A surviving CCC would be great timeline material, but how it unfolds all depends on how later administrations and Congresses use and develop the program.
 
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Would conservation be considered a national service alternative during times of military draft? Would it be attacked during the Cold War as a Communist relic? Would an alternate counterculture or environmental movement decry it for militarizing and manicuring the wilderness? A surviving CCC would be great timeline material, but how it unfolds all depends on how later administrations and Congresses use and develop the program.

It was attacked during its existance for those reasons. I expect it could become another Army Corps of Engineers in terms of patronage projects & thus a talking point for fiscal conservatives.
 
One of the most sociologically unstable things to happen to plague any society is a large group of unemployed or underemployed young men, unmarried. In addition to the useful work a CCC could do, many of the young men in the category above would derive lifelong benefit from 2 years in the CCC in terms of discipline, learning to work with others (including members of ethnic/religious groups outside their own), and potentially learning marketable skills. CCC experience could also provide improved education for many of these youths whose literacy, mathematical, and other skills are marginal. Sure, not all of these young men will emerge at the end of two years improved and able to make contributions to society or decide to further their education, but the majority (perhaps the great majority) will. Even if all that wasn't true, simply getting a lot of these young men off the streets and in a controlled environment is a good thing.

IMHO some sort of national service would be a good thing, and certainly the CCC option would be better for many young men in the USA than the current non-options.
 
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