178 ChaPter^4
also called a “Bank Holiday” to shut them down so depositors could not make
a run on them and leave their vaults empty. As one Congressman described
it, FDR “drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th—and
they were all back on the 9th.”
Some of the programs in the First New Deal aimed to help those in need.
FDR established a government corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, to
bring electricity into the Tennessee authority, a particularly hard-hit area. He
created the Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC], one of the most successful and
beloved programs, in order to put young men to work cleaning up the envi-
ronment, building parks, planting trees, and so forth. Maximum enrollment
at any time was 300,000 in the CCC [the cumulative total for the 9 years of
the program was about 3 million], and in many areas Blacks and Latinos were
not allowed to participate. Corpsmen built over 30,000 wildlife shelters,
stocked rivers and lakes with a billion fish, cleared beaches and campgrounds,
built over 800 parks, and planted nearly 3 billion trees. The men in the CCC
got shelter, clothing and food, along with a small stipend of $30 a month, of
which $25 had to be sent home to one’s family, in order to stimulate someFIGuRE 4-5 Members of the CCC work on a Department of Agriculture
project in Maryland, 1933