The CCC died in 1942, but the idea never did. Episode 14 closes at the 90-year-old stone wall and traces eighty years of revival attempts — AmeriCorps, the state corps, the Civilian Climate Corps, Biden's American Climate Corps — to its termination in January 2025 and the deep AmeriCorps cuts that followed.
29 Jun 2026
Why Congress Killed Its Most Popular Program (1942)
In 1942, Congress shut down the most popular program of the New Deal — at the height of its acclaim. Episode 13 lays out the wartime turn, the long-standing objections, FDR's failed bid to make the corps permanent, and what died with it versus what survived.
28 Jun 2026
Were There Women in the CCC? The Camps History Forgot
The CCC put three million men to work and enrolled exactly zero women. Episode 12 tells how women were shut out, and the much smaller, underfunded FERA camps — mocked as the 'She-She-She camps' — that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hilda Worthington Smith fought for, and that Congress let die by 1937.
28 Jun 2026
Were People of Color in the CCC? The Enrollees History Didn't Count
The CCC's records had two boxes — 'colored' and 'white' — so when tens of thousands of Hispanic men and the men of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the territories served, the program could barely count them. Episode 11 recovers the corps' other people of color, candid about how thin the record is.
28 Jun 2026
The CCC Indian Division: A New Deal on the Reservations
The CCC had a second, separate corps that let Native men work their own land partly on their own terms. Episode 10 tells the story of the Indian Emergency Conservation Work program, John Collier's Indian New Deal, and the genuine agency and persistent paternalism, held together.
28 Jun 2026
The CCC's Jim Crow: 250,000 Black Men, Segregated by Order
The CCC offered relief and skills to roughly a quarter-million Black men — and wrote Jim Crow into federal policy to do it. Episode 9 tells the program's central contradiction through Director Robert Fechner's 1935 segregation order, soberly and without erasing either side.
28 Jun 2026
How the CCC Put a Library, a Newspaper, and an Artist in Every Camp
The CCC built more than trails and bridges — it ran one of the largest adult-education and cultural programs in the country. Episode 8 goes inside the camp libraries, the after-hours schoolhouse, the newspaper Happy Days, and the New Deal's roving artists, honest about how uneven and segregated it was.
28 Jun 2026
How the CCC Invented the American Outdoor Weekend
The lake you swim in, the campground you pull into, the state park down the road — the CCC probably built it. Episode 7 covers the water projects, the wildlife restocking, and the recreation infrastructure that helped invent mass outdoor recreation, with an honest note on the ecological costs.
28 Jun 2026
How the CCC Fought the Dust Bowl
As the Great Plains blew away, the CCC became the muscle behind the fight to hold the soil: roughly 6.6 million check dams and a thousand-mile wall of trees. Episode 6 tells how conservation became disaster response — and the limits of the fix.
28 Jun 2026
Why CCC Trails and Stonework Still Look New 90 Years Later
Dry-laid stone steps and switchbacks built in the 1930s still look finished last year. Told by a former Forest Service trail-crew member, Episode 5 explains why the craft endures — and turns, soberly, to the 400-500 families cleared off the land at Shenandoah to build the parks.
28 Jun 2026
How the CCC Planted 3 Billion Trees
They called it the Tree Army for a reason: roughly three billion trees, thousands of fire lookout towers, and a national war on tree disease. Episode 4 is admiring but honest about the fire-exclusion doctrine and monoculture planting that later forest science came to question.
28 Jun 2026
How the CCC Secretly Rehearsed World War II
The U.S. Army ran the CCC camps — and in feeding, housing, and moving hundreds of thousands of men, it rehearsed the mobilization of World War II. Episode 3 follows George C. Marshall and the corps-area commanders, and the militarization question, handled squarely.
28 Jun 2026
$30 a Month, $25 Sent Home: Life Inside a CCC Camp
The CCC paid each young man thirty dollars a month and required that twenty-five be mailed straight home. Episode 2 tells the program at the scale of one life: the day in camp, the weight gained by men who had been hungry, the education program that taught 40,000 to read — and the soft coercion underneath.
28 Jun 2026
The 37 Days That Built the Civilian Conservation Corps
In the spring of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt turned a campaign idea into a quarter-million men in the woods in just thirty-seven days — the fastest peacetime mobilization in American history. Episode 1 of Roosevelt's Forest Army opens at a 90-year-old Sierra stone wall and tells how the Emergency Conservation Work Act stitched four federal agencies into one machine, and why the CCC was beloved from day one.
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