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Title: 'Building Better Men': Education, Training and Socialization of Working-class Male Youth in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2005

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Abstract: The Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942) was a New Deal relief program designed to deal with what society then perceived to be the occupational and educational needs of America's young, jobless men. In its nine-year existence, nearly three million enrollees in their teens and early twenties "graduated" from the program. Most were high-school dropouts and the vast majority of them came from the working class. An in-depth study of the CCC's multi-faceted agenda reveals a great deal about inter-war American society's expectations for working-class men and boys, their understandings of youthful masculinity, and their interpretations of work, education, and citizenship, and it is the argument of this dissertation that the CCC can and should be seen as an important crossroads for American working-class male youth in the early-20th century. For instance, coinciding as it did with the growth of public schooling and especially of the public high school in the United States, the CCC stands as one of the most ambitious national attempts of the inter-war period to educationally serve what had been a relatively under-served and under-represented sub-section of American society. The CCC also reflects the growing importance of the state in the average American citizen's life in the first half of the 20th century. The attention that the federal government paid to young working-class men in the Civilian Conservation Corps was unprecedented in American history up to that point, and the all-inclusive nature of the program had obvious, lasting influences on its recruits. Finally, the CCC provided a modern-day "rite of passage" into adult manhood for its Depression-era enrollees. Living with 200 other young men at secluded, backwoods campsites resulted in the development of highly masculinized social spaces where boys learned lessons in communal living and tolerance. Cultural life in the camps was replete with highly stylized rituals, colorful initiation rites, and enrollee-enforced codes of conduct. The worlds created by the boys serving at individual camps, I argue, were of equal historical importance to the programs developed by CCC administrators, and in some cases, were perhaps of even greater importance in the boys' personal experiences overall.

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Authors: Suzik, Jeffrey Ryan

Institution: Carnegie Mellon University

Department: Department of History

Advisor: John Modell

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Pittsburgh, PA

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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