The Civilian Conservation Corps in Utah

Millions of young Americans suffered a crisis in arrested adolescent development during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Poverty-stricken, they did not have the normal coming-of-age experiences in American society, from finishing their education and landing their first job to living on their own and managing their own money. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's favorite New Deal program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (Ccc) rescued 3 million young males from their desperate plight and uncertain futures. During its nine-year existence between 1933 and 1942, the Ccc helped conserve not only American youth but also the environment (with labor-intensive conservation projects), enrollee families (with twenty-five dollars of enrollee earnings sent home each month), and the economy (with projects such as wilderness trails to stimulate tourism in national forests). In 1967 John Salmond wrote what would be a long-admired history of the Ccc. Salmond hoped that The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study might inspire state-level interest in the Ccc. It did so, and subsequent studies have considered the Ccc in at least eighteen states, from California to New Hampshire. A fine doctoral dissertation on the Ccc in Utah was among the first of these state-specific works to appear, in 1970. Forty-two years later, an acquisitions editor at the University of Utah Press contacted the dissertation's author to ask if he would be interested in having it published. Kenneth W. Baldridge says he was flattered to receive that invitation—every graduate student's dream, no matter how long it took to fulfill. Baldridge knew he needed to do a great deal to update his original work, but he was up to the challenge, no doubt inspired by the Ccc's slogan, “We can take it

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