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work. Ten days later Roosevelt signed the bill creating the CCC.. The project was called Emergency Conservation Work (ECW), but the president's original name for its youthful workers immediately captured the fancy of the public, the press, and the participants. Initially, any unemployed young man aged eighteen to twenty-five and unmarried could sign up for a six-month hitch with options to reenlist for up to two years. A great many did. The age limits shifted numerous times during the length of the CCC's existence. but always hovered a few _years on either side of twenty-one. The government paid the enrollees thirty dollars a month, and required that they send twenty-five of that home to their families." • Another significant product of Roosevelt's hectic first one hundred clays was federal legislation creating the wide-ranging Federal Emergency Relief Administration. At first the majority Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Message to 73rd Congress, March 21, 1933," in Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Year of Crisis, 1933, Vol. 2 of The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Random.House, 1938), 80. 'q See FDR Official Files (O.F.) 268: Civilian Conservation Corps, Container 1 (1933), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York 12538 (hereafter cited as FDR Library). This box contains numerous documents that explain in detail the roles of the various government departments, as well as the scope. frequently amended during its first months. of the CCC. Many published sources are available on the CCC: among the more valuable (albeit subjective) ones written during the New Deal years are James J. McEntee, Now They Are Men: The Story of the CCC (Washington, D.C.: National Home Library Foundation. 1940), and Ray Hoyt. "We Can Take It": A Short Story of the CCC (New York: .American Book Company, 1935). Probably the best secondary study is John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933- • 1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham: Duke University Press. 1967). See also Perry H. Merrill. Roosevelt's Forest Army: A History of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942 (Montpelier, Vt.: Merrill, 1981).