by Nick Taylor.

Bantam. 630 pages. $27.

BY EDWARD J. RENEHAN JR.
Special to the Journal

This year is the 75th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. To celebrate, Nick Taylor eloquently and vividly details the rich and triumphant history of FDR’s masterstroke. Over the eight years of its life prior to the dawn of World War II, this massive jobs program not only delivered much-needed salaries, capital projects and arts projects to the Depression-afflicted American people, it also delivered large and essential doses of hope and self-respect.

Under the WPA, amid a devastated nation, construction workers built dams and schools, fledgling historians took oral histories from aged ex-slaves, painters created murals that still adorn many of our most beautiful public spaces, rural workers improved our nation’s wild places, and writers created a series of 48 American Guide Series books, one for each state.

Among the authors given work by that WPA division called the Federal Writers Project were John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Loren Eisley, Richard Wright and Studs Terkel. Among the artists employed by the Federal Artists Project was George Biddle. Meanwhile, the Federal Theater Project gave support to John Houseman and Orson Welles, and also mounted the first American production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

Capital projects developed under the WPA include New York’s LaGuardia Airport, the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood, Oregon, National (now Reagan) Airport, Outerbridge Drive on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and scores of roads, stadiums, and libraries that still give good service today in communities across the continental United States.

FDR’s program — conceived and administered for the most part by Harry Hopkins — cost the federal government $11 billion overall, and employed no fewer than 8.5 million men and women. With the WPA, writes Taylor, “the Roosevelt administration placed an extraordinary bet on ordinary people, and the nation realized a remarkable return. The story of the WPA reminds us that the backbone of the United States is the strength, the patience, and the underlying wisdom of its people when they are called upon to face a crisis and are given the means to overcome it.”

Taylor’s insightful, panoramic account does its large subject proud, while reminding us that our country is often at its best when confronting great and grave obstacles. In the final analysis, the WPA of the New Deal made true partners out of citizens and their government, each supporting and helping the other as they limped together toward a better tomorrow, gathering strength with every step. AMERICAN-MADE: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA,