That’s what my then eighty-six year old Uncle Lou said. To me. In a moment when others weren’t present. I asked if it had been a WPA job and he said that it had been with the CCC. I wanted to hear more, but the private moment was lost as others rejoined us. It was as if Uncle Lou had shared a secret with me. Or maybe it was only a secret because he’d never spoken of that time of his life. The few years before WWII and his seven year enlistment in the US Navy. More than a decade before he’d met and later married my mother’s sister.
“Mr. Roosevelt Gave Me A Job.”
Some sixty-five years later and for a reason or reasons unknown to me, it still resonated enough for him to speak of it. If only briefly, possibly in passing, but not in front of his wife and her other relatives. What was unmistakeable in his phrasing, tone, and feeling was gratitude and respect for Mr. Roosevelt. Unlikely to have been shared within the very conservative Catholic family he married into. Perhaps and perhaps not forgotten over the decades when he cast his secret ballot.
Lou was one of the fortunate ones that during a period of high youth unemployment* Mr. Roosevelt gave him a job. A job that likely contributed to the well-being of his parents and siblings as well as himself, but for a nation even more than that. As Eleanor Roosevelt so clearly articulated in 1934 :
“I have moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.”
–New York Times, 5/34
Watching the GOP freak-out over the latest unemployment rate of 7.8% is somewhat amusing until I recall that President Obama has stated that government doesn’t create jobs. That would be one issue on which Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney seem to agree. When this country needs another Mr. Roosevelt, we get two candidates espousing the outsourcing of job creation to the free market fairy. Because today there are millions of mature and financially secure Americans like my Uncle Lou that today say, “Mr. Reagan gave me a job.”
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Worth reading: Bob Herbert’s For Obama, No More Excuses
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In the face of the worst economic calamity since the 1930s, the United States needed a mammoth job-creation and economic revitalization program, a New Deal for the 21st century. But that would have required presidential leadership capable of challenging the formidable opposition mounted by the very folks who caused the crisis in the first place. Instead we got a woefully insufficient stimulus program and a failed effort at some kind of grand bargain between the president and the retrograde Republicans in Congress. That grand bargain would have imposed austerity measures that would
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* Youth unemployment as high as 30% according to The Roosevelt Institute That 30% may be a wild under-estimate given current evidence in the US and other countries. Recent US figures on youth unemployment have been on the order of twice that of the overall unemployment rate. That multiple of two-times is what is currently seen in Ireland. Two-times plus in Spain and Greece, but a whopping three and half times in Italy. Therefore, when the aggregate US unemployment rate was 25% during the Hoover Depression, why was the a youth unemployment rate a mere 20% higher?
I’ve often wondered about the men who lived in the CCC camp at the state park near my home in southern Indiana. They built much of the park’s infrastructure that remains to this day.
They left the gift of their labors to a beautiful piece of nature that is visited and loved by millions every year.
Me too. I was so disappointed that Uncle Lou chose not to tell me his story. Many undoubtedly went on to be part of what is now known as “The Greatest Generation.” The lucky ones like Lou got a secure job after WWII with decent wages and benefits and lived a long life.
Please thank your Uncle Lou for me if you can. My life has been intertwined with that 15,000 acre park since I was old enough to ride a bike. More recently I’ve fought a lot of fires there and done some rescues on the back trails. No matter the reason, I’m always awed by its beauty when I’m there.
That brief tete-a-tete with Uncle Lou happened one evening on my last visit with my mother’s remaining relatives in 2000. His physical health declined rapidly after that and he died in 2001. He and my aunt lived all but the first two years of their marriage in the new house they bought (for cash) in 1951. He built the detached garage and finished the basement himself — possibly with skills acquired in the CCC because his job after the navy was in an optical factory. A working wife, no children, and thriftiness allowed him to indulge in a new car every two years and dress nattily like Johnny Carson.
My Dad was in the CCC also. I’ve often wished that we had something like it to maybe restore environmental damage in coal country or plant more trees and shrubs to restore forests.
It seems that my whole life youth unemployment has been double the average and black unemployment also roughly double with black youth at four times the average. 80% during the Depression would not surprise me.