The Civilian Conservation Corps grew out of the crisis conditions of the early 1930s, when the stock market crash of 1929 helped bring on the Great Depression and poor soil conservation, combined with drought, turned the western states into a vast dust bowl. In the 1932 presidential election, a desperate nation near panic turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt amid rampant unemployment and economic chaos. Accepting the presidential nomination on July 1, 1932, Roosevelt planned to combat soil erosion and declining timber resources by putting unemployed men from large urban areas to work. After his election, he quickly called the 73rd Congress into emergency session on March 9, 1933, seeking approval for a program to recruit thousands of unemployed young men, organize them into a peacetime army, and send them to fight the destruction of the nation’s natural resources. More than three million men eventually took part in this widely popular New Deal program, known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC.