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Book Review
| The Civilian Conservation Corps in Nevada: From Boys to Men. By Renee Corona Kolvet and Victoria Ford. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2006. xxi + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95; The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona's Rim Country: Working in the Woods. By Robert J. Moore. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2006. xvi + 156 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95.
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| These two monographs on Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) share numerous characteristics. Both focus on the CCC and its conservation projects in the western United States, each examines in detail the Corps' impact on the local level, and the authors of these books all use oral interviews with former Corps enrollees to help construct their histories. The result is a pair of interesting, well researched, and readable descriptions of the CCC program, its conservation work, and the experiences of Corps enrollees in Nevada and across Arizona's Rim Country. Yet in focusing primarily on facts, these two books also share a missed opportunity to place the CCC into a broader, more analytical context that could have shed new light on the New Deal and the Great Depression era. |
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Renee Corona Kolvet and Victoria Ford undertook their study of the Corps in Nevada in order to "raise awareness of this popular New Deal program" (p. 4). They accomplish this by weaving together each of their research expertise. Kolvet, a research archeologist from the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas, conducted archival and field work that allowed her to locate, visit, and map all of the fifty-nine CCC camps that operated in Nevada. Ford, an oral historian who once worked for the University of Nevada Oral History Program, interviewed fifteen former enrollees about their time spent in the Corps. The authors supplement this unique blending of methodologies with examination of local, state, and national sources such as town newspapers, government reports from state land managers, and official publications from the Corps' headquarters in Washington, D.C. This "melding of history and personal recollections," the authors rightly claim, "helps capture the human side of this unparalleled effort to save a generation at risk" (p. 4). |
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Kolvet and Ford have divided their book into two main parts. After a brief introduction, part 1 of the book includes four chapters that provide background context for the CCC program by laying out the general history of the Corps, the economic crisis affecting Nevada's ranching and mining industries during the early Great Depression, the arrival of the CCC in 1932, and the Corps' financial and social impact on local communities. In the second part of the book the authors summarize, in separate chapters, different kinds of Corps work supervised by various federal agencies including the Grazing Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Navy, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Soil Conservation Service. Kolvet and Ford end their story with a short chapter on the legacy of the Corps and its lasting impact on CCC enrollees in the postwar era. The result is an extremely well-organized book that describes in detail both the history of the CCC and the wide variety of conservation projects it undertook throughout Nevada. |
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Robert Moore's Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona's Rim Country is a less neatly organized book. Moore begins with a general overview of the CCC in the state of Arizona, and then examines in a single chapter all of the fourteen Corps camps located in Rim Country, which the author unfortunately fails to identify geographically for readers unfamiliar with the region. The rest of the book seems divided between thematic chapters focusing on camp leisure after work, interaction between enrollees and local community members, and the importance of camp newspapers, and additional interspersed chapters that highlight the stories of individual Corps enrollees. While Moore is understandably "proud to present this collection of experiences from CCC boys that might otherwise have been lost" (p. xiii), by shifting back and forth between thematic content and personal history the book often reads like two separate histories. |
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Similar to Kolvet and Ford, Moore successfully combines on-the-ground fieldwork with social history research. Having worked for many years as a seasonal interpretive ranger for the U.S. Forest Service in Rim Country, Moore searched for, found, and visited each of the fourteen Corps campsites in the area, and includes detailed descriptions of these sites both during the Great Depression and today. He also conducted at least six oral interviews with former CCC enrollees, and reproduces these young men's private photographs taken while in the Corps. Moore complements this research by examining an impressive variety of sources, including CCC camp inspection reports, U.S. Forest Service papers, and, most important, numerous camp newspapers published by enrollees in the Corps' Rim Country camps. "Aside from the remembrances of the old-timers themselves," argues Moore, "the camp newspapers are the real record of the CCC boys" (p. 105). As a result, The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona's Rim Country presents a solid social history of the New Deal program in this region. |
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While both of these books do a wonderful job exploring the CCC "from the bottom up," neither is analytical, and this is the most glaring drawback of both monographs. For instance, while Kolovet and Ford include transcriptions of several oral interviews as "sidebars" throughout their book, they refrain from interpreting these testimonies as part of a larger historical argument about the Corps or the New Deal. Moore does similarly with camp newspapers; he reproduces drawings and cartoons that appeared in enrollee publications during the 1930s but never analyzes them as historic texts that might give insight into the history of the Great Depression era. Nor do these books engage historiography, including that from the field of environmental history. They refrain from entering into dialogue with historic literature on, for instance, the conservation movement in the United States or ideas about nature during the interwar years. Yet by laying out the factual history of the Corps in these two regions, both books will nevertheless help, as Moore argues in his conclusion, "to keep the lessons, adventures, and accomplishments of that era alive after the CCC boys leave us" (p. 127). |
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Neil M. Maher, associate professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark, is the author of Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Conservation Movement (Oxford, 2007). |
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