Fun pictures and the CPS Frozen Fund

In the past week, I've read Keim's Illustrated History of CPS and Nolt's article about the Frozen Fund. In Keim's work, I found a few photos from the camp that grandpa worked at and one that I think he is actually in! I posted the photos in their own separate page. There is a photo of the soil lab where grandpa may have done work although he's not in the picture. The book was really interesting and told a really good story about what daily life was like and how the CPSers filled their time. It also went into great detail about the severe labor shortages at mental health hospitals and farms.  It was very sad to see pictures and read about the deplorable conditions these people were in. One health worker to 300 patients, clothing shortages, and incontinence leading to groups of naked, filthy, miserable people. The CPS works tried to do what they could to clean the people and the building and provide them with clothes and blankets when they could.

Farm shortages led to an alternative work program that grandpa was involved with (camps 97 and 100.)  He traveled around to local farms and tested milk which is categorized as CPS unit 100. According to Nolt's article, since the Selective Service didn't want to take jobs away from those who needed them by providing free labor to businesses, the businesses were required to pay the CPSers. But, since the CPSers weren't allowed to get paid, the money had to go into what was called "The Frozen Fund." The original idea was to use the funds for foreign recovery projects at the end of the war. Nolt goes on to explain all the ways in which the historic peace churches tried to appropriate these funds to recovery projects by proposed bills in congress. Many attempts were made to fund different projects including UNICEF, a program called CARE to provide technical books to Europe after their resources had been destroyed, as well as a few others. All of these attempts failed for various reasons. One failed because an opinion that the funds should not go to the United Nations which was already funded by the US prevailed. Another attempt failed because the congressman who proposed the bill was an entry on a list of congressmen who were communists. In general, Nolt sums it up saying The peace churches' simple plans and requests met with success in creating the CPS program because the state, too, wanted to avoid dealing with COs in World War I style (most were imprisoned and many died due to poor treatment). When the same type of simple plans and requests-this time to release the frozen fund-came from the peace churches following the end of the war, the requests were unsuccessful in part because the state had no substantial stake in seeing the plans carried out.

In the end, the ~$1.2 million (1945) earned by the ~1200 CPS service men who volunteered for these positions was appropriated to the general treasury fund and not used for its intended purpose.

As promised, I posted one article from grandpa's newsletter called The Peace Advocate. The articles that I have that he wrote were from the 90's.