The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a job relief program that operated during the years of the Great Depression. From 1933 to 1942 the CCC employed three million unmarried, unemployed young people to help families receive an income during the New Deal era. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the man who created this aid program on March 9, 1933, and the bill establishing the CCC was passed by Congress shortly thereafter on March 31, 1933. President Roosevelt was impeached during the his presidency that he was not the man who created the CCC and simply stole the idea from letters sent to him during the onset of the Great Depression. Two separate men who supported the creation of were Joseph Wilson and Major Julius Hochfield. He claimed that he had never read any of the letters supposedly sent to him about the CCC's thoughts. He also never addressed the subject of other countries, but instead linked the Corps back to his time as governor of New York, who put unemployed men to work in state parks and forests. Whether or not the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps was President Roosevelt's alone, it had an enormous impact on U.S. employment and environmental issues. In April 1933 he emphasized that he would carefully check and examine any location before starting any project. . Doing this in the western United States would be very simple because government-owned land was plentiful in this area, but very scarce east of the Mississippi River. Most privately owned land was located in the eastern parts of the United States, but Congress allowed this property to be purchased, donated, condemned, or otherwise acquired. By purchasing passage of this law Roosevelt was able to accumulate twenty million acres of privately owned land, which increased federally owned land by 15 percent during the New Deal era. With these purchases he allowed the CCC to set up camps in every state of the Union and in every territory. In its nine years of existence, the Civilian Conservation Corps did more than simply provide jobs for unemployed men. James McEntee, the director of the CCC, knew it was too late to restore some of the damage that had already occurred due to negligence in recent years, but he considered the Corps an extraordinary achievement for the United States.