Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces Description: The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) operated from 1933 - 1942, it was a labor force meant to help those hardest hit by the staggering unemployment caused by the financially crippling Great Depression. The CCC was the first and most successful of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal work programs. With the President’s personal approval, a small, but unique group of artists were assigned to CCC camps to artistically document the life and work. The art created chronicled what is now recognized as the greatest conservation movement in American history. A young, untried artist, Reima Victor Ratti, like so many young, unemployed boys of his generation joined the CCC to help himself and his family, but Ratti did so with the eye of an artist. What transpired, during his CCC days and beyond, was life changing, news worthy, history making and tragic. His talents were validated when his status changed from laborer to artist. He found confidence and purpose painting the rock crushing CCC hand labor that changed the course of the Milwaukee River; or a sketching a “Tree Army” in the midst of battling fires on remote Isle Royale, he was an embedded CCC artist in his element, creating what he saw and felt. These experiences inspired his crafting of a small sculpture symbolizing a CCC boy after a days work done. When this figure surfaced, six decades later, the CCC alumni recognized themselves in Ratti’s art. They used it as a model for a monument, the CCC Worker statue, which can be found in our state and national parks. It is a statue to remind all in posterity of the great and lasting good accomplished by the CCC during a time of great adversity.
Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces Description: The CCC, operated from 1933 to 1942, was the first and most successful of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Great Depression work programs. It is now recognized as the greatest conservation movement in United States history. The CCC was a labor force comprised of single young men, World War veterans, Native Americans and another unique group that, until now, has rarely been mentioned . . . Artists. President Roosevelt gave his personal approval for the making of an pictorial record by sending artists into CCC camps. CCC ART - Artists of the Civilian Conservation Corps - Marshall Davis has been deeply researched. It explains the genesis of the CCC art program and its administration by dedicated New Dealers in the Treasury Department and other agencies. A remarkable story emerges of one young, untried artist, Marshall Davis, unemployed and struggling during the cruelest years of the Great Depression until his talents are recognized. He became an embedded reporter and artist.His numerous illustrations are rich with entertainment, humor and insight. Characterizing the real story of a New Deal program that is said to have saved America. Davis understood the CCC because he was one of them.
Description: The 1930’s were a time of unimaginable adversity. It was the era of the Great Depression, Dust Bowl and New Deal work programs. The first and most successful work program was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Millions of unemployed boys from the cities, farms and plains joined “Roosevelt’s’ Tree Army”. With shovels and axes, they planted billions of trees, fought forest fires and advanced the conservation movement by a generation in many sections of the US. Between 1933 - 1940, they toiled along the cliffs of the New York/New Jersey Palisades and the marshes of the New Jersey Meadowlands. They worked, they played, they grew up and in the process became a generation of young men with a new found respect for conservation and patriotism. They were "The Boys of Bergen".
