Rizzo Goes to Work

Late one afternoon last week a sleek grey taxicab purred up to the Army Building in downtown Manhattan and out of it stepped a youth named Fiore Rizzo. Out also stepped three other young men. The taxi meter registered 65-c-. The four passengers had only 50-c- between them.

An Army captain obligingly paid the other 15-c-. Fiore Rizzo marched into the Army Building and announced that he was ready to go to work in the woods. He was, he said, 19, single, one of a family of 13 and had been unemployed for a year. His father had not had work in three years. An Army doctor listened to Fiore's heart, thumped his chest, looked down his throat, passed him as physically fit. Fiore Rizzo signed a blank authorizing the Government to pay $25 of his $30 monthly wage to his family, swore a 250-word oath which he did not fully understand and was shipped off to an Army post near New Rochelle as the first recruit in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The enlistment for six months of Fiore Rizzo and 24,999 more citizens like him last week was President Roosevelt's first direct attack upon ranks of 13,000,000 unemployed. By authority of last fortnight's relief act, he issued an order creating the C. C. C. and providing it with $10,000,000 as a starter. Appointed Director of Emergency Conservation Work (salary: $10,200) was Robert Fechner, 57. of Massachusetts, a vice president of the International Association of Machinists. The selection of this tall, austere Laborite was a sop to the A. F. of L. and its opposition to $1-per-day relief work.

President Roosevelt apportioned the first C. C. C. recruits as follows:

New York. . . . 7,500 St. Louis 900

Buffalo 600 Kansas City . . 400

Chicago 4,000 Baltimore .... 1,000

Philadelphia . .3,000 Boston 900

Pittsburgh .... 900 Milwaukee . . . 600

Detroit 2,200 Washington .. . 500

Cleveland . . . .1,000 Minneapolis . . 500 Cincinnati .... 500 Newark 500

Enlistments were limited to single men between 18 and 25 whose families had been long on municipal relief rolls. They were all required to make a substantial allotment from their pay to their depend ents. At Army camps they were issued: O. D. (olive drab) woolen trousers, O. D. flannel shirts, work trousers, underclothes, socks, shoes, raincoat, jumpers, work hat, cravat, belt, barracks bag, two O. D. blankets, mess kit. For two weeks the Army was to condition them, teach them the rudiments of camp life. As civilians they were not to be put through military drills. When sufficiently toughened, units of 20 to 100 were to be shipped to National Forests where they will plant trees, clear brush, work roads, build fire controls and fight insect pests. The U. S. Forest Service has 1,000,000 man-months of work waiting to be done by the C. C. C. when recruited to full strength (250,000). Explained Director Fechner:

"Most of the men called will be off the bread line. The work will not be intensely laborious--but it will be work. Tennessee will be one of the first states to receive a substantial number of workers because it is already warm there. There will be no military features in connection with the camps."

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