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The overwhelming unemployment problem, perhaps even more than banking, clamored for prompt remedial action. Roosevelt had no hesitancy about using federal money to assist the unemployed, and at the same time to "prime the pump" of industrial recovery. One has to pour a little water into a dry pump to start the flow.
The Hundred Days Congress responded to Roosevelt's spurs when it created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) — an organization that proved to be perhaps the most popular of all the New Deal "alphabetical agencies". The law provided employment in fresh-air government camps for a total of about three million uniformed young men, many of whom might otherwise have been driven by unemployment into criminal habits. The work was useful-including reforestation, flood control, and swamp drainage-and the recruits were required to help the old folks by sending home most of their pay. Both human resources and natural resources were thus conserved.
The first major effort of the new Congress to grapple with the millions of adult unemployed was the Federal Emergency Relief Act, its chief aim was immediate relief rather than long-range recovery. The resulting Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was handed over to zealous Harry L. Hopkins, a spindly, shabbily dressed, chain-smoking New York social worker who had earlier won Roosevelt's friendship and who became one of his most influential advisers. Immediate relief was also given to two large and hard-pressed groups by the Hundred Days Congress. One section of the Agricultural Adjustment Act made available many millions of dollars to help farmers meet their mortgages. Another law created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). Designed to refinance mortgages on nonfarm homes, it ultimately assisted about a million badly pinched households.
In the face of continuing unemployment, the President himself established the Civil Works Administration (CWA) — late in 1933. As a branch of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, it also fell under the direction of Hopkins. It was designed to provide purely temporary jobs during the cruel winter emergency.
