Civilian Conservation Corps
The CCC or Civilian Conservation Corps was a New Deal program initiated by Franklin Roosevelt to provide the unemployed (typically 18-25 year old men) with work. In the case of the CCC, these jobs were manual labor working on conservation projects on government-owned (whether Federal, state or local level) land.
Speech Relevance[edit]
In 'A Time For Choosing', Reagan speaks of a Great Society program idea which would operate in a similar fashion to the CCC camps with the goal of giving school drop-outs something constructive.
Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending...one more program to the 30-odd we have — and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs — do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
It would appear that Reagan is speaking of either the Job Corps or the Neighborhood Youth Corps.
