A Connection

Franklin Roosevelt with CCC members, Shenandoah National Park, 1933In a way, this week’s readings seemed like a giant contradiction to everything else that we read this semester. It was weird to be concerned with the high percentage of wage workers who didn’t receive paid vacations after weeks of unemployment and homelessness and starvation. But after a little research, it seems that there is a connection between this world of improved automobiles and the idea that workers to go away for vacations to relax and come back better at their jobs and an overall increased interest of tourism—the national park system.

PBS recently showed this mini-series called “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” which is all about the history of the National Parks and how they came to be and developed since the 1800s. There’s a whole episode dedicated to the 1930s and early 1940s, and it focuses on Franklin Roosevelt’s specific interest in National Parks and how they were affected by the Great Depression. A big part of Roosevelt’s New Deal was to lower unemployment, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the programs created to do that. “The CCC put young men to work in national forests, state parks and national parks, clearing brush and replanting forests, fighting fires, building visitor shelters and ranger cabins, and improving campsites and trails,” and is an example of the these two different worlds of Americans coming together. The poor and unemployed were put to work building parks that the growing group of tourists would want to visit. The government spent about 218 million dollars on national parks during the thirties and the CCC put more than three million men to work building 97,000 miles of fire roads, planting 3 billion threes, and preventing soil erosion on 84 million acres of farmland.

After reading these articles and then about the history of national parks, it makes sense that tourism and parks experienced such periods of growth at the same time. In the beginning of the 1930s, parks received about 3 million visitors a year, but by the end of the decade they were getting more than 15 million people a year. People were traveling by car, which made parks easily accessible. And part of the reason that paid vacations became so popular was because employers believed that allowing their workers to get away for a week or two at a time would rejuvenate them and when they came back, they’d be better workers. Parks provided vacationers with cheap and easy ways to get away from home and into the wilderness—camping was free and nature was relaxing.