Franklin D. Roosevelt takes his oath of office in 1933 with the country in the depths of the Great Depression, unemployment lines stretching from Texas to Detroit. This film traces one of his first responses: the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program that put young, unemployed men to work planting trees, building trails, and constructing dams in national parks and forests across the country. Archival photographs and newsreel footage follow the Corps from its rushed creation through its camps, its daily routines, and the millions of acres of public land it reshaped before the program wound down during World War II. The film traces how a jobs program aimed at feeding families and easing social unrest ended up leaving a physical legacy still visible in parks and forests today, and it treats the CCC as both an emergency measure and an early experiment in large-scale federal conservation work.