Camp We-Kan-Tak-It: Tales from the first Great Depression

Oh, the 1930s—it was a time when boys wore their pants hitched up to their navels, cars had running boards, and there was a little thing called the Great Depression greatly depressing everybody. Nowadays, with youth unemployment high and the environment an ever-pressing issue, it's a perfect time to reconsider the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that set up military-style camps that gave work to thousands of young men who could send money home while replanting forests lost in the vast lumber cuts of previous decades. Under the direction of government experts, CCC kids built many of the quaint lodges, trails, and bridges that grace our public parks to this day.

Rogers Keene of Voices Theater recently talked with The A.V. Club about his latest play, Camp We-Kan-Tak-It, a multi-media musical remembrance of the CCC in Wisconsin, produced in collaboration with Milwaukee Public Theatre. Keene's experience in grassroots theater began with his Masters thesis on political theater at UW-Madison and led to work with the Heritage Ensemble, producing original shows based on stories of "everyday people" in Wisconsin history. Now living in Medford, Keene founded Voices Theater in 2000. Camp We-Kan-Tak-It is touring Wisconsin communities near where the CCC actually had camps back in the ’30s, and comes Friday to Boerner Botanical Gardens.

The A.V. Club: What inspired you to do a show about the CCC?

Rogers Keene: Well, I always wanted to work with Barbara Leigh [of Milwaukee Public Theatre]. We wanted to do a show on the hard times of the ’30s, and we knew the CCC was such a great project, so that's what we did. We based everything in the show on this monstrous stack of camp papers. All these young men—17, 18, 19 years old—talked about their experience in the camp newspapers. Each camp had about 200 men. They maintained discipline; they made sure the guys had clothes and great food. The weight these fellows put on was amazing, because most of them came in undernourished; they got a lot stronger because the work was out in the forests and the roads. They tried to get these kids to take classes, because then they could go back to jobs.

AVC:  How does your play show all these different aspects of life in the camps?

RK: This was a toughie. I found out reading camp papers from 39 different camps that what happened in one camp basically happened in the other camps, so we created this mythical camp. "We can take it" was the national slogan of the CCC. And it's these two guys creating this entertainment show for the camp—that's also taken from the camp papers. They would do this all the time. So, it was the perfect format for us to do all these sketches and songs.

AVC: Does this play advocate socialism?

RK: [Laughs] Advocate socialism? This show doesn't take any sides; it's telling what actually happened. After the show, we have discussions to compare what happened back then to what's happening now. That's sparked some good discussions. Now, the arguments that are being used against Obama today, some of these were used against FDR back then. A lot of people refused to take public relief; if they failed in the depression, they blamed themselves—they could never really say why they felt that way. The word "socialism" came up—that was a major, major argument against having these programs. But FDR had a lot of business people on his side-- they saw themselves going under. And out of this nine years of federal programs, a lot of this kept on. Will Obama throw a couple of billion dollars into our forests to create jobs for young people? I kind of doubt it. Right now there are no stimulus programs to create jobs for everyday folks.