New book traces history of WPA (AP)

LOS ANGELES - When this reporter was a lad during the Great Depression, I took the yellow streetcar to downtown L.A. and paid 10 cents to see a first-class vaudeville show, complete with singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers and magicians.

The production wasn't sent out from Broadway. Rather, it was financed by the federal government, one of myriad projects created by the Works Progress Administration -- or WPA, as it was known to a prewar generation of Americans.

The WPA's Federal Arts Program commissioned out-of-work actors, directors, stagehands, musicians, painters and sculptors to produce plays, circuses, concerts and murals for public buildings across the land, including the Smithsonian Institution and Ellis Island.

But the WPA's contributions weren't limited to the arts.

The agency hired 8.5 million workers and spent $11 billion over a period of eight years to pave highways, build municipal airports (New York's LaGuardia and Washington's Reagan National), repair bridges, serve lunches to school children, and create such landmarks as Camp David, San Antonio's River Walk and the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

Bantam Dell has recently published a book with a title befitting its heft: "American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR Put the Nation to Work," by Nick Taylor.

The WPA was born on March 21, 1935, a first-term vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose primary mission at the time was to put America's 5 million unemployed back to work.

In his State of the Union address earlier that year, Roosevelt had cited the millions depending on welfare, which "induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. ... Work must be found for the able-bodied but destitute workers."

Soon WPA projects were thriving in all 48 states and in the territories of Alaska (Federal Building, Ketchikan) and Hawaii (civilian and military airfields, Oahu).

"One of the great thrusts of the WPA was to pave the rural roads so farmers could get their crops to market," Taylor said in an interview from his home in New York. "In Jackson County, N.C., less than a mile of rural roads were paved."

Taylor, 62, who co-authored former U.S. Senator and astronaut John Glenn's memoir, started work on "American Made" in 2000 and figured it would take three years to complete. It took almost twice that time. "I kept finding out how much I didn't know," he said.

He did research at the National Archives in Washington and the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y. He also tracked down the few surviving workers of the WPA.

"I found a couple of carpenters in New York by approaching the local carpenters union," he said. "These were about the most difficult to find, because the laborers didn't really record their stories."

Workers in the creative arts programs proved easier to find. "I got a line on a fellow named Tom Fleming who lived in San Francisco," Taylor recalled. "He ended up in the writers project doing research for the California Guide." Such guides contained historical and geographical information for each of then 48 states and two territories.

The WPA was greeted with jeers from conservatives, who regarded the projects as busy work. The New York Times ran a headline: "$3,187,000 Relief Is Spent Teaching Jobless to Play."

Spending tax dollars on arts and entertainment was especially irritating to detractors.

"A lot of people thought it was OK to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, which dated back to the 19th century," Taylor noted. "Yet there were things they couldn't see the value of, such as using public money for the arts."

The WPA's Federal Arts Program was the idea of WPA chief Harry Hopkins, who initiated it while Roosevelt was out of town. The program provided grants for such writers as Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Conrad Aiken, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, Frank Yerby and Richard Wright.

Actors on the WPA payroll included Orson Welles, who directed "Macbeth" and "The Cradle Will Rock" in New York, Joseph Cotten, Sidney Lumet (before his directing career) and Burt Lancaster, hired as an acrobat for a circus. Theater projects were launched in 31 states, offering plays, musicals, circuses, dance troupes and marionettes.

So what finally killed the WPA?

Not the constant attacks by detractors, but World War II.

But Taylor notes the agency provided one last boost for the country before folding. "After the start of the War ... it devoted itself mostly to military-related projects. WPA helped the United States solve the shortage of aircraft mechanics."

Then, with unemployment at zero, WPA lost its reason for survival. It ended business on June 30, 1943, returning $105 million to the Treasury.