Civilian Conservation Corps

Lassen National Forest, California, around 1933. Two Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees, stripped to the waist, work a crosscut saw through a beetle-infested pine. The corps was one of the first New Deal relief programs, putting young unemployed men to work in forests and parks, and it ran until 1942. Set against the breadlines and shack towns of the same years, this is what the government's answer looked like on the ground: paid work, a camp and hard labor outdoors.