The WPA story: FDR, its workers and its great projects in the Northwest

"American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation Back to Work"

Nick Taylor

Bantam Books, $27, 640 pp.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) lasted less than a decade (1935-1943), but its revolutionary impact can still be felt today.

Thanks to this New Deal program, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law as a response to the Depression, the Golden Gate Bridge was completed, the Statue of Liberty was saved from erosion, countless roads and schools and bridges were created or salvaged, free hot lunches were served to millions of kids, stranded people were rescued from hurricanes, and millions of unemployed adults went to work for their government.

"It has added to the national wealth, has repaired the wastage of depression and has strengthened the country to bear the burden of war," wrote a proud FDR shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked. During the 1930s, when military appropriations were small, the Army and Navy were rescued from obsolescence by the WPA.

Locally, we can thank the WPA for Woodland Park Zoo, Green Lake and several airports. Timberline Lodge, created from scratch on the slopes of Mount Hood and painstakingly restored by a nonprofit Oregon group, is perhaps the most impressive national monument produced by the WPA.

"Its accomplishments were enormous, yet during its lifetime it was the most excoriated program of the New Deal," writes Nick Taylor in "American-Made," his comprehensive, sometimes impassioned account of the WPA's rise and fall.

"Its workers were mocked as shiftless shovel leaners," he writes. "Its projects gave rise to a mocking new word: 'boondoggles.' Red-baiting congressmen called it a hotbed of Communists." The Chicago Tribune described the WPA as "a vampire political machine." One agitated Republican representative referred to it as an attempt "to sabotage the capitalist system."

Yet, since the late 1960s, Taylor has found "fresh appreciation and new advocates," inspired partly by communities that have rediscovered their WPA legacy. He sees this as a tribute to "the New Deal's fundamental wisdom of treating people as a resource and not as a commodity."

He attributes much of the program's success to Harry Hopkins, a relentless social worker who helped to convince Roosevelt that the WPA was a priority. When FDR took office in 1933, one-quarter of the nation's workers were jobless and 60 million people were without any financial support. Some families were living on $2 a month.

Taylor doesn't have much use for the previous U.S. president, Herbert Hoover (famous for such bromides as "The cure for unemployment is to find jobs" and "Nobody is actually starving"), or Hoover's equally clueless businessman pal, Walter S. Gifford, who is described as "not the only idiot" advising Hoover.

"It was an administration that didn't believe in government," said Taylor by phone from New York. "It's remarkable how little the politics have changed from the 1930s to today. The right still sees government as the enemy of free enterprise."

In the book, Taylor refers to "the two Americas" and notes that FDR, like several 21st-century liberals, was accused of instigating "class warfare" by calling attention to the widening gap between rich and poor.

To get away from statistics, he interviewed several people who had survived the period, including Grace Overbee, a "packhorse librarian" who was employed by the WPA to bring books to tiny Kentucky communities. Treated like royalty for a job that gave her unexpected status, she became known as "The Book Lady."

"Several people were in their late 80s/early 90s by the time I talked to them," said Taylor. Sometimes odder and more satisfying than fiction, their stories help to give the book a personal touch. Also singled out are Johnny Mills, a self-sufficient farmer who turned to the WPA to get medical help, and Henry Moar, a tiny man who poured concrete and packed lumber at Timberline.

"The lodge is a monument because everything the WPA did was under this one roof," said Taylor. "The workers created the road and the lodge and took huge chunks of granite out of Mount Hood. They made wrought-iron lamps, lampshades made of animal hides, draperies, bedspreads — it was all so well taken care of."

When FDR and his wife, Eleanor, arrived in the Northwest in 1937 to dedicate the Timberline, a special podium was designed by the president's team to hide the extent of Roosevelt's paralysis from polio. By this point, they were expert at such disguises.

The book doesn't neglect the politicized atmosphere back in Washington, D.C., where FDR failed to liberalize the Supreme Court, weathered an untimely late-1930s "Roosevelt recession" and was loudly condemned by Ernest Hemingway, who accused him of not responding quickly enough to a Katrina-scale storm in Florida.

Using his position to keep millions of people on the government payroll, Hopkins was developing loyal friends (the press couldn't get enough of his quotable comments) and powerful enemies — mostly because of his attempts to increase the WPA budget.

"He was not afraid to respond to politicians," said Taylor. "He was not politically correct." Indeed, Taylor calls him "a lightning rod for action, fiercely honest, hated by conservatives, reviled by the anti-New Deal press, and adored by the people who worked for him." He doesn't take long to come through as the hero of the story as Taylor tells it.

Author of many nonfiction books, including a John Glenn biography, an account of a family running from the mob ("Sins of the Father") and the tale of a 30-year patent war ("Laser"), Taylor has spent the past seven years working on "American-Made."

"I wanted something that would deliver me from physics and more than that, from patent law," he said. "John Glenn told me about overhearing his parents, who thought they might lose their house [during the Depression], but then his father got a job for the WPA.

" I thought other people would have memories like that. ... I didn't realize how much I didn't know."

John Hartl is a frequent contributor to The Seattle Times: johnhartl@yahoo.com.