minutes Keynes searched his memory for a forgotten name, hardly knowing what he was saying about silver and balanced budgets and public works. At last it came to him: Sir Edward Grey-more solid, cleverer, much more fertile, sensitive and permeable, but still an Americanized Sir Edward Grey. When Roosevelt got down to economics, Keynes's disappointment persisted. He told Frances Perkins later that he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking"; to Alvin Johnson, "I don't think your President Roosevelt knows anything about economics."

XI

Keynes found others in Washington more receptive. Steered around by Tugwell, he met a number of the younger men and told them to spend a monthly deficit of only $200 million, he said, would send the nation back to the bottom of the depression, but $300 million would hold it even and $400 million would bring recovery. A few days later he sent Roosevelt the draft of another New York Times article entitled "Agenda for the President." Here he continued his running review of the New Deal, saying he doubted whether NRA either helped or hurt as much as one side or the other supposed and again defending the agricultural policies. As usual, the best hope remained an increase in public spending; $400 million, through the multiplier, would increase the national income at least three or four times this amount. In detail, Keynes advocated special efforts in the housing and railroad fields. "Of all the experiments to evolve a new order,” he concluded, "it is the experiment of young America which most attracts my own deepest sympathy. For they are occupied with the task of trying to make the economic order work tolerably well, whilst preserving freedom of individual initiative and liberty of thought and criticism." With this, Keynes, pausing only to make astute investments in the depressed stocks of public utilities, returned home.

Newspapermen were quick but wrong to ascribe the increase in spending in the summer of 1934 to Keynes. No doubt Keynes strengthened the President's inclination to do what he was going to do anyway, and no doubt he showed the younger men lower down in the administration how to convert an expedient into a policy. But it cannot be said either that spending would not have taken place without his intervention or that it did take place for his reasons. In 1934 and 1935 the New Deal was spending in spite of itself. The deficit represented a condition, not a theory. What was happening was a rush of spending for separate emergency purposes. "I think that 95 percent of the thinking in the administration is how to spend money," said Henry Morgenthau in a morose moment in the summer of 1935, "and that possibly 5 percent of the thinking is going toward how we can work ourselves out of our present unemployment." Certainly, except for Marriner Eccles, no leading person in Roosevelt's first administration had much notion of the purposeful use of fiscal policy to bring about recovery; and Eccles' approach, with its rough-and-ready empiricism, lacked the theoretical sophistication and depth of Keynesianism. Roosevelt's own heart belonged-and would belong for years-to fiscal orthodoxy. "I doubt if any of his reform legislation," wrote Stanley

High, a close adviser in 1936, "would give him as much satisfaction as the actual balancing of the budget."

In 1935 Keynes was a potential rather than an actual influence. But circumstances were making the atmosphere increasingly propitious for his ideas-ideas which received their classic statement in February 1936, in his "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money." If Keynes' direct impact on Roosevelt was never great, his ideas were becoming increasingly compelling. They pointed to the alternatives to the first New Deal, and they provided an interpretation of what worked and what didn't in American economic policy. As no one knew better than Keynes, "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else."

[From the New Republic, May 29 and June 12, 1935]

ROOSEVELT'S TREE ARMY

(BY JONATHAN MITCHELL)

Henceforth, the CCC is to have an enrollment of 600,000 boys at a time double the present number. This means that perhaps onethird of the depression youth is to pass through CCC camps. Created overnight, the CCC is on its way to be an institution of immense social importance.

The CCC's original objectives were, first, to prevent the Nation's male youth from becoming semicriminal hitchhikers and, second, to make possible conservation work on a grand scale. In these aims it has succeeded. It has kept boys off street corners and out of hobo jungles along automobile trunk roads. It has been a godsend to boys who, because of the depression, have not had enough to eat. Recently the writer talked with a shy, blond boy from a rural slum, the skin of whose arms and legs was blackened and cracked from malnutrition. A few days in camp, and the boy had gained 5 pounds, his skin was healing, and he was happy as a cricket. The War Department estimates that the average gain in weight among the boys has been 8 pounds.

Experts say that, as a result of the CCC, conservation work in America has been advanced by 20 years. The bare replacement value of projects completed by the CCC is put at $335 million. Forests on Government- and State-owned land have been dotted with observation posts, connected by telephone, and crisscrossed by roads and trails, so that fires, once detected, can be quickly reached. The CCC has made the first serious effort to deal with soil erosion and, throughout the Middle West, temporary check dams have been built to retain surface water. Around Norris Dam, where the boys have had the use of machinery belonging to the TVA, their soil erosion work has been extremely elaborate. They have also planted many millions of young trees-the jobs from which their nickname, Roosevelt's "Tree Army," comes. They have fought the pine twig blight and the Dutch elm disease, restored Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, wiped out mosqquito plague spots in the South, and done many other useful jobs. To cite figures, up to April 1, the boys had spent 15 million man-days fighting forest fires, built 50,000 miles of forest roads and trails, strung 25,000 miles of telephone wire, constructed 800,000 erosion dams, excavated 3,000 wells, planted 236,000 acres of tree seedlings, and dug 1,200,000 yards of mosquito-control ditching.

Necessarily, for most boys, the camps form a training school in adult social behavior. In this part of its task, the CCC has only partially succeeded. Many camps have done well with their boys, but a substantial minority of camps have tended to become small, mutinous prisons, in which the social attitudes acquired by the boys have been

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altogether bad. Primarily, this has been due to the weakness of the CCC's central organization. Nominally the CCC's head is Robert Fechner, whose office is supposed to be a coordinating agency for the War Department, which furnishes the camp commanders; the Office of Education, which furnishes the camp educational advisers; and the Interior and Agriculture Departments, which furnish the experts who direct conservation work. In practice, however, supervision over the camp lies with the commanders of the nine Army corps areas. These corps area commanders are conscientious enough about the physical health of the camps-in inspecting water supplies and latrines-but, for the most part, they have neither time nor desire to worry about the camps' social atmosphere, as expressed in the boys' recreational and educational activities. Probably it is fair to say that, in the Army, the CCC is regarded as an unwelcome chore, outside the proper interests of professional fighting men.

Fechner himself has no way of estimating conditions in the 1,600soon to be 2,900-CCC camps, except through personal visits, and through his 9 investigators, 1 in each corps area. An old-time union official and vice president of the International Machinists, Fechner has been greatly concerned to see that all construction work is done by union labor, and his nine investigators have been kept busy checking up on contractors. For his knowledge of individual camps, he has had to rely on the corps area commanders. The more serious weakness in the CCC organization, however, has come from the long feud between Fechner and the CCC educational director, Dr. C. S. Marsh, which will be discussed in a succeeding article.

The result of the War Department's indifference, and the friction between Fechner and Marsh, has been to throw great responsibility on the camp commanders. When the CCC was first established, camp commanders were all Regular Army officers. During the last year, Reserve officers have been substituted in all camps except that at Warm Springs, Ga. This camp is regularly visited by Roosevelt, and the War Department, which thinks of everything, keeps a Regular Army officer at its head. The Reserve officers all belong to the college unemployed, the group that has suffered most from loss of self-esteem and unaccustomed hardship. Most of them regard their jobs in the CCC as a stopgap to better times that are disappointingly slow in coming. It is to their credit that they have been able to show the enthusiasm and iniative they have.

A camp in the eastern part of the country in which a food riot lately occurred illustrates, however, the sort of situation that is possible under the present lack of centralized supervision. In this camp, the boys refused to eat, knocked the company commander's assistant down, kicked him and sent him to the camp infirmary with painful injuries. The company commander in this camp is a man in his thirties, and has been a year in the CCC. In his first camp, in the West, he showed great enthusiasm. He organized a band, and took it to play at outside dances until the organized musicians of the State justifiably complained and forced him to stop. With his assignment to his present camp, however, his enthusiams died. He has a wife and two half-grown children, and he began to worry over his future. Although he had liked the boys in the first camp, in his second camp he began to hate them. The boys, quick as wild animals to sense an

older person's real feelings, grew uneasy, restive, and the food riot and the beating of the company commander's assistant followed.

The result of this superficially trivial incident has been extremely bad. The camp resembles a jail, and social behavior appropriate to a jail, toadying, malingering, wreaking petty revenges, is being inculcated in the boys. The camp's recreational and educational activities have lost all life. The company commander is bitter about the boys, but does not dare relieve his bitterness by discharging the leaders, since he fears an investigation by the corps area headquarters that might cost him his job, which he needs. This situation may easily run on for weeks. The gravest accusation against the CCC is that it has no specialized machinery for uncovering cases like these and correcting them.

It should be repeated that a majority of camps have done well with the boys. Probably the best camps are those with enrollee self-government enrollee is the CCC term for enlisted men. Many other camps have enrollee councils and camp forums. Such devices, giving the boys responsibility for their own social actions, are evidences of a good camp. They are unworkable except where camp commander and boys trust and like one another. These camps are the ones with baseball squads, camp newspapers, dramatic companies, weekly movie nights and fortnightly dances. Along with this successful majority of camps, however, must be recognized an unsuccessful and morbid minority. The size of this minority can be gaged from the CCC's estimate that it has had a 20-percent turnover in company commanders. This is another way of saying that a fifth of the company commanders appointed have been so conspicuously unfit that it has been necessary to discharge them. It is also revealing that, while the physical health of the boys has been extremely good, cases of mental breakdown have been unexpectedly high. In March 1934, a special order was issued rigidly to exclude all boys with histories of mental or emotional instability from the CCC, "since their difficulties are likely to be increased, rather than improved." A few CCC disasters have attracted national attention, notably the killing of Lt. J. L. Gatlin at Pine Valley, Okla., and the riots at Bear River, Calif., West Orange, N.J., and in the Worcester, Mass., railroad station.

One of the greatest handicaps of the CCC has been the meagerness of its equipment. Many camps cost less than $20,000 apiece, and this sum covered company commander's home, infirmary, barracks and messhall. At the start, for athletic equipment each camp of 200 boys received 4 horseshoe-throwing sets, 2 volleyball sets, 4 sets of boxing gloves, and bats, balls and gloves for two baseball teams. For educational material, a camp was given 6 sheets of writing paper and 2 envelopes per man per week, a set of Army and Navy hymnals, a dictionary and half a dozen Spalding athletic handbooks, and the right to share with other camps in the use of a traveling library of detective stories.

In practice, the equipment of the camps has depended chiefly on the enthusiasm and enterprise of camp commanders. Good camp commanders have made friends of leading citizens in neighboring towns and begged athletic equipment, musical instruments, books, magazines, drawing materials, tools, material for window curtains, grass seed, the use of a printing press for a camp newspaper-almost anything. For