The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) began in early 1933, under its FDR-appointed director, Robert Fechner, a union leader who had previously been the vice president of the International Association of Machinists. The CCC was a public work relief program for unemployed young men, aged 18-25, who worked on government-owned lands, mostly on natural resource conservation projects. The U.S. Army ran the program, which was therefore sometimes jocularly referred to as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army.” It ended in 1942. The CCC’s Second Corps Area included New York and New Jersey, and in these two states there were 75 camps, most of which resembled rustic World War I Army camps. Some of them were essentially tent towns and were occupied only during the warmer seasons, but others served as winter quarters as well and were constructed of timber buildings and masonry. The enlistees who served in each camp generally came from all over the country. The young men who enlisted from Onondaga County, for example, were transported by train to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where they were given some very basic training before being assigned to CCC camps around the country.

The CCC, from its winter quarters at Camp 55 on the south side of Upper Green Lake State Park near Fayetteville, worked on the construction of the Green Lakes golf course a half-mile away. The course is still open. The Fayetteville Free Library has an online exhibit about the work of the CCC at Green Lakes State Park, which includes interesting photos of the CCC at work on the park. In Pratt’s Falls County Park, in Manlius, 6 miles southeast of Syracuse, the CCC worked throughout the park on stone retaining walls, roads, trails, buildings, and bridges. In Morgan Hill State Forest the CCC planted millions of conifer trees from seedlings trucked in from the Corps’ tree nursery near Albany. On the Onondaga Reservation, the National Youth Administration and the WPA funded a community center built in 1940 by Indian youth, as well as a model program for training Indians who were then employed as youth camp counselors in the region. Except for the emergency occasioned by a forest fire in October 1935, when 150 CCC men from nearby camps were brought in to help fight the fire, the main CCC did not extend its work into the reservation. Instead, a separate organization—in keeping with the tribe’s sovereignty—called the Indian Emergency Conservation Work Program (IECW), which was renamed the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division (CCC-ID) in 1937—was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but with all projects cleared by the tribal council and employing Indian workers. These projects included the development of forest land, clearing brush, the straightening of roads, watershed protection, boundary demarcation, flood control and soil erosion measures, and the construction of drainage ditches between 1935 and 1937.

Near CCC Camp 15, known as “Cross Clearing Camp,” at Tupper Lake, in Franklin County, the WPA had undertaken a project in 1933-34 to reconstruct the dam on the Lower Racquette River to control the water level. Soon afterward, the CCC had their enlistees clearing rocks, stumps and debris out of the river course to allow navigation on the river and to make it possible to float logs downstream. The site of the Tupper Lake CCC camp is apparently still discernible and directions for finding it are in a 2006 article by Tupper Lake town historian Bill Frenette. A list of other CCC camps in the Adirondacks (and so generally northeast of Onondaga County), is on history researcher Marty Podskoch’s Civilian Conservation Corps Stories website. A CCC camp was established at Gilbert Lake State Park, in the town of New Lisbon, north of Oneonta in Otsego County. Nowadays the park features the New York State Civilian Conservation Corps Museum, one of 12 CCC museums around the country. It displays photos and memorabilia from CCC work at the park and elsewhere. The Corps built many of the park’s 221 campsites and 33 cabins that are still in use today. At Camp 31 at Chittenango Falls State Park, in Madison County, near Cazenovia, the CCC worked on the park’s trails and roads and built the stone facilities and shelters that are still there. At Camp 20 at Selkirk Shores State Park, near Pulaski in Oswego County on Lake Ontario, the CCC cleared trees and brush for public campsites (still open) and created a swimming beach (now closed), reforested conifers, straightened small streams, and cleared the bank of the Salmon River for public access. Also in Oswego County, the WPA and CCC planted conifers in land around Kasoag and built Mosher, Whitney and Long Ponds by constructing small dams. One of the lasting effects of the CCC, which is certainly still "visible" in a sense, not only in rural New York but also throughout the country, was its fostering of a basic kind of conservationist view of America's wilderness areas among its enlistees and their families. As a consequence, it played a strong part in the birth of what we know regard as the environmental movement.

Eli Whitney patented his cotton engine, or “gin,” in 1794. A mechanical device to separate cotton fibers from cotton seed, it dramatically lowered the cost of producing cotton fiber. Formerly, workers (usually slaves) had separated the seeds from the lint by hand, painstaking work that required hours of work to produce a pound of lint. By mechanizing the process, the gin could produce more than 50 pounds of lint per day. Cotton fabric, formerly quite expensive due to the high cost of production, became dramatically cheaper, and cotton clothing became commonplace. In the early decades of the 19th century, Southern farmers shifted more and more of their acreage into highly profitable cotton production, and large-scale plantation agriculture became common in the Deep South states of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The gin’s effect on the economy and on the lives of the slaves who made up a significant part of that economy was complex. The cotton gin freed slaves from the arthritic labor of separating seeds from the lint by hand. At the same time, the dramatically lowered cost of producing cotton fiber, the corresponding increase in the amount of cotton fabric demanded by textile mills, and the increasing prevalence of large-scale plantation agriculture resulted in a dramatic increase in the demand for more slaves to work those plantations. Overall, the slave population in the South grew from 700,000 before Whitney’s patent to more than three million in 1850—striking evidence of the changing Southern economy and its growing dependence on the slave system to keep the economy running. Cotton cultivation proved especially well-suited to slave labor. A relatively delicate plant, growing and harvesting cotton was a labor-intensive process. On large Southern plantations, much of that labor was provided by slaves working in gangs. Gang labor fit the slave system particularly well: dozens of slaves collected into a work crew could be supervised by a single white overseer, which made for more efficient work. Unlike solitary jobs like shepherding, which made constant supervision of individual slave workers extremely difficult from a practical standpoint, gang labor in the cotton fields allowed one overseer to supervise (and, when necessary, to discipline and punish) large numbers of slaves simultaneously.

On large cotton plantations both the work and the punishments were unremitting and unforgiving. During the height of harvesting season, slaves worked from sunup to sundown; when the moon was full, they worked into the night as well. Slaveowners varied in their reputations for physical violence, but none eschewed punishment completely in the quest to extract more labor from their charges. Beatings and whippings were frequently used to coerce recalcitrant slaves; slaves who resisted labor or attempted to escape were punished with mutilation, sale away from their families, and occasionally death. There is no simple calculus to determine whether and how the cotton gin affected the lives of individual slaves. It is possible that the adoption of the gin made the working hours of a few individual slaves somewhat less difficult. However, given the barbarity of slavery generally—rampant physical and sexual abuse, the separation of families, lives of forced labor in acute deprivation, and the overarching dehumanization that the system enforced—it seems clear that any invention that encouraged the growth and expansion of the institution increased the misery of slaves in the aggregate acutely. Given the cotton gin’s effects on the spread of large-scale cotton agriculture and the resultant growth in the institution of slavery in the first half of the 19th century, it is difficult to portray its introduction as anything other than a disaster from the perspective of enslaved African-Americans.

The name refers to a race riot that occurred in the industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois, over July 2-3, 1917. It is also referred to as the “East St. Louis Riot.” As historians have looked at its various causes, they have labeled it in different ways, depending on what aspect of it they have focused their attention on. Some recent historians have called it a “pogrom” against African Americans in that civil authorities in the city and the state appear to have been at least complicit in—if not explicitly responsible for—the outbreak of violence. Even in 1917, some commentators already made the comparison between the East St. Louis disturbance and pogroms against Jews that were occurring at the time in Russia. Roving mobs rampaged through the city for a day and a night, burning the homes and businesses of African Americans, stopping street cars to pull their victims into the street, and assaulting and murdering men, women, and children who they happened to encounter. A memorial petition to the U.S. Congress, sent by a citizen committee from East St. Louis described it as “a very orgy of inhuman butchery during which more than fifty colored men, women and children were beaten with bludgeons, stoned, shot, drowned, hanged or burned to death—all without any effective interference on the part of the police, sheriff or military authorities.” In fact, estimates of the number of people killed ranged from 40 to more than 150. Six thousand people fled from their homes in the city, either out of fear for their lives or because mobs had burned their houses.

In the early years of the 20th century, many industrial cities in the North and the Midwest became destinations for African Americans migrating from the South, looking for employment. East St. Louis was one of these cities, where blacks found opportunities to work for meatpacking, metalworking, and railroad companies. The demand for workers in these companies increased dramatically in the run-up to World War I. Some of the workmen left for service in the military, creating a need for replacements, and the demand for war materiel increased industrial orders. The workforce had been highly unionized and a series of labor strikes had increased pressure on companies to find non-unionized workers to do the work. Some companies in East St. Louis actively recruited rural Southern blacks, offering them transportation and jobs, as well as the promise of settling in a community of neighborhoods where African Americans were building new lives strengthened by emerging political and cultural power. By the spring of 1917, about 2,000 African Americans arrived in East St. Louis every week.

Racial competition and conflict emerged from this. The established unions in East St. Louis resented the African American workers as “scabs” and strike breakers. On May 28-29, a union meeting whose 3,000 attendees marched on the mayor’s office to make demands about “unfair” competition devolved into a mob that rioted through the streets, destroyed buildings, and assaulted African Americans at random. The Illinois governor sent in the National Guard to stop the riot, but over the next few weeks, black neighborhood associations, fearful of their safety, organized for their own protection and determined that they would fight back if attacked again. On July 1, white men driving a car through a black neighborhood began shooting into houses, stores, and a church. A group of black men organized themselves to defend against the attackers. As they gathered together, they mistook an approaching car for the same one that had earlier driven through the neighborhood and they shot and killed both men in the car, who were, in fact, police detectives sent to calm the situation. The shooting of the detectives incensed a growing crowd of white spectators who came the next day to gawk at the car. The crowd grew and turned into a mob that spent the day and the following night on a spree of violence that extended into the black neighborhoods of East St. Louis. Again, the National Guard was sent in, but neither the guardsmen nor police officers were at all effective in protecting the African American residents. They were instead more disposed to construe their job as putting down a black revolt. As a result, some of the white mobs were virtually unrestrained.

A national outcry immediately arose to oust the East St. Louis police chief and other city officials, who were not just ineffective during the riots, but were suspected of aiding and abetting the rioters, partly out of a preconceived plan, suggested Marcus Garvey, to discourage African American migration to the city. The recently formed NAACP suddenly grew and mobilized—with a silent march of 10,000 people in New York City to protest the riots. They and others demanded a Congressional investigation into the riots. The report of the investigation, however, pointed to the migration of African Americans to the East St. Louis region as a “cause” of the riot, wording that sounded like blaming the victims. As Marcus Garvey had said of an earlier report of the riot, “An investigation of the affair resulted in the finding that labor agents had induced Negroes to come from the South. I can hardly see the relevance of such a report with the dragging of men from cars and shooting them.” A similar point about simple justice for the victims and where to place the blame for the riots nearly caused ex-President Theodore Roosevelt to come to blows with AFL leader Samuel Gompers during a public appearance shortly after the riot. Roosevelt demanded that those who had perpetrated the violence and murders in East St. Louis be brought to justice. Gompers then rose to address the crowd and, as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, wrote, “He read a telegram which he said he had received tonight from the president of the Federation of Labor of Illinois. This message purported to explain the origin of the East St. Louis riots. It asserted that instead of labor unions being responsible for them they resulted from employers enticing Negroes from the south to the city ‘to break the back of labor.’” This enraged Roosevelt, who jumped up, approached Gompers, brought his hand down onto his shoulder and roared that, “There should be no apology for the infamous brutalities committed on the colored people of East St. Louis.” Roosevelt, like many other Americans of all races, was particularly appalled by the irony that such an event could occur in the United States at the same time that the country, by entering World War I, was declaring its intentions to export abroad its vision of freedom and justice. This theme was picked up by many editorial cartoonists in newspapers across the U.S. East St. Louis was by no means the only northern industrial city to experience race riots during this period. A conviction grew among some African Americans that they could not depend on an enlightened white community or government, either in the South or in the North, to insure their rights and their safety, but that they would have to fight for their own rights. In an editorial entitled "Let Us Reason Together," in his magazine, The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”