Fiscal Policy: The Legacy of the New Deal

This is probably Brad's territory - it's about a professor at Berkeley talking about and documenting the "largely forgotten ... public-works legacy of the FDR era" that is still all around us - but Brad's kind of a blogland wallflower and he may be too shy to promote things related to Berkeley, so I'll note it here:

New life for the New Deal, by By Barry Bergman, Berkeley News: When Gray Brechin set out to document the New Deal’s legacy in California, the mission seemed modest enough. Little did he know. What began as a two-person effort — just him and a photographer — has since morphed into a kind of community-based archaeological expedition...

“I liken it to coming across a ruin in a jungle and starting to dig and you find it’s not only a building, it’s a city, and then you find it’s an entire civilization that’s been buried and forgotten,” says Brechin, a widely known “historical geographer” who earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. at Berkeley and is now a visiting scholar here. “In this case it’s our civilization, it’s something that we did.”

Just 75 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, Brechin believes America has largely “buried and forgotten” what the New Deal meant to a nation suffering mightily under the weight of the Great Depression — even though, as he’s discovered, we’re still reaping the benefits in the form of public art, park trails, golf courses, amphitheaters, school buildings, hospitals, bridges, streets, sewers, and aqueducts. During a 10-year period, millions of out-of-work men helped build physical infrastructure with the federal Civil Works Administration, Public Works Administration, and Works Progress Administration; “boys” age 18 to 25 did their bit for family and country by joining the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was dubbed Roosevelt’s “tree army.”

Much of that infrastructure has fallen into disrepair, and veterans of the CWA, PWA, CCC, WPA, and other alphabet-soup agencies are a rapidly dying breed. Meanwhile, the social safety net created in the wake of the U.S. economy’s 1929 collapse has come under increasing fire in what Brechin calls “a long war on the New Deal” dating to the Republican presidency of one-time FDR Democrat Ronald Reagan, and carried on today by proponents of further deregulation and privatization. “The goal was to essentially do away with the last vestiges of the New Deal,” he says, “and they’ve been largely successful.”

Enter the Living New Deal Project. ... To Brechin, a California native who’s written extensively about the state and its history, the lessons of the New Deal are unmistakable and deeply personal. In the wake of 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he explains, “I was just headed down the road to complete despair. This has really saved me. I want to give that to other people who are involved in the project. Because it gives you a glimpse of an alternate reality.

“It’s not utopia,” he’s quick to add. “We actually achieved this. And it’s astounding what we were able to achieve, and what you can achieve when you’ve got something we’ve forgotten about, which is compassionate and ingenious leadership. It’s been so long since we’ve had that, and most of the people who’ve experienced it are dying away.”

His lectures, Brechin says, “come as a thunderclap to students,” many of whom have grown up with little knowledge of the era or its accomplishments.

In that respect, they’re not unlike Brechin himself, who seems just as surprised by the magnitude of his modest dig through the New Deal’s bounty. “I’ve been learning from the moment I got started,” he says. “And it’s been the most wonderful and overwhelming experience of my life.”

To learn more about the Living New Deal Project — or to find the locations of New Deal sites in California — visit the project website at livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu.

Comments

[alphie]

The only period America's GDP grew at a rate close to China's current growth rate was...during FDR's admin.

Employ people to build things that make all Americans more productive and the economy takes off...go figure.

[kthomas]

"and he may be too shy to promote things related to Berkeley" - That's funny. I can't tell you how much I love/hate that place. Its purity. Its people. Its smells. Its history.

I myself cross two bridges created during New Deal everyday when I go to work.

Love him or hate him, one must always respect PoUS 32. Hands down, my favorite politician from the 20th Cent.

This guy wasn't afraid of anything, or anybody.

Heaven forbid another depression comes. People will be speaking his name loudly then.

"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."

"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."

[prostratedragon]

In outlying areas of Chicago, say the South 80-hundreds and beyond, many of the neighborhood parks were laid out by the New Deal work corps. These parks are generally a couple of acres, sometimes more, and have at least playgrounds, basketball courts, and a softball diamond.

The rather luxurious one in my neighborhood, built before the residential lots were filled out (I wonder whether some local realtor wasn't bailed out!) has a second baseball field, concrete sprinker pools, a fieldhouse with activity rooms, and an olympic-size pool.

One of my grand-uncles would always point with pride to the work he had done on that park as a teen-ager in his first real job. When I was by there a few weeks ago, the park seemed still to be at a high standard of maintenance.

In the same neighborhood my elementary school featured some murals in the Rivera-inspired style that certain of our teachers were proud to say had been painted by WPA artists. (Years later, I concluded from this and other hints that those teachers were probably sticking their tongues out at the last of the local blacklist snitches; this was in the very early 1960s. They were a marvelous group.)

Prof. Brechin's project sounds like a model that could stand replicating throughout the country.

[Callahan]

Good place to pilot such an innovative idee-yer is Michigan, we lead the nation in many undesirables such as unemployment, foreclosures, loss of manufacturing base, recessionary way of life, people leaving including college grads.

So why wait for the entire nation to get knocked down to Michigan's status? Let's deal a new one now!

[anne]

"Just 75 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, Brechin believes America has largely 'buried and forgotten' what the New Deal meant to a nation suffering mightily under the weight of the Great Depression — even though, as he’s discovered, we’re still reaping the benefits in the form of public art, park trails, golf courses, amphitheaters, school buildings, hospitals, bridges, streets, sewers, and aqueducts. During a 10-year period, millions of out-of-work men helped build physical infrastructure with the federal Civil Works Administration, Public Works Administration, and Works Progress Administration; 'boys' age 18 to 25 did their bit for family and country by joining the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was dubbed Roosevelt’s 'tree army.' "

The over-arching object of conservative pretend historians has been to deny and ridicule our wonderful New Deal legacy, of which I am ever more conscious from noticing the fine New Deal structures everywhere evident to remembering the redefining of civil rights by Franklin Roosevelt that were the basis for civil rights today however much they are threatened, to understanding what Social Security and Medicare mean to us.

[anne]

We became a middle class nation during and in the wake of the New Deal, through New Deal programs which proved wonderfully successful from Europe to Japan and are proving wonderfully successful when currently adopted in developing countries, and we need to remember and renew the heritage now as the American middle class is being increasingly pressed.

American real weekly and hourly earnings have increased a mere 1% from the recovery from recession in November 2001, through George Bush's compassionately conservative Administration. So much for recovery.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/great-depression-blogging/

January 17, 2008

Great Depression Blogging
By Paul Krugman

Can’t resist. I see that Anna Schwartz is blaming * the Fed for the subprime crisis; I have some sympathy for this view, but not for the reasons she gives. But anyway, the article mentions the whole “did the Fed cause the Great Depression” issue, and explains succinctly why the Friedman-Schwartz claim that it did matters:

“The book was a bombshell,” says British monetarist Tim Congdon. “Until then almost everybody thought the free-market system itself had failed in the 1930s. What Friedman-Schwartz say was that incompetent government bureaucrats at the Fed had caused the Depression.”

The trick here is the word “caused”. Everyone agrees that the Fed failed to do what it should have in an effort to prevent the Depression. But saying that it “caused” the Depression is like saying that FEMA, through its inadequate response, caused the devastation of Katrina. The market system did fail; government’s failure was in not doing enough to rescue the system.

On what basis do I say this? Here’s annual data on monetary base (blue) and M2 (red), with 1927=100. The monetary base is bank reserves plus currency in circulation. It’s what the Fed controls directly: monetary base only gets created or destroyed through Fed actions. M2 is a broad definition of the money supply, including a wide variety of bank deposits, preferred by Friedman and Schwartz.

As you can see, M2 plunged in the Depression– and the Fed should have tried to prevent that. But the reason M2 plunged was because of the banking crisis, which led people to prefer cash to bank deposits and led the surviving banks to hold lots of reserves. This reduced the “money multiplier”: the amount of money supported by a dollar of reserves.M2 did not plunge because the Fed sharply reduced monetary base, although there were occasions in later life when Friedman asserted that it did.

The point is that the Fed’s sin was passivity. What the economy really needed was more activism.

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;jsessionid=VGSBTFPGLQGO5QFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/money/2008/01/13/ccschwartz113.xml

[anne]

Notice Paul Krugman's chart in the post; the only complaint I have of the New Deal is that there was such conservative opposition that stimulus-activism was at times too muted. Nonetheless, beyond irrational opposition stemming for Herbert Hoover do-nothingism, the New Deal was a splendid success the evidence of which is everywhere found.

[ken melvin]

Beautiful.

[Bruce Webb]

Unleash your inner FDR.

Very fascinating piece and not just because I am a Berkeley alum.

The political story that is Reaganism and to a reduced degree Clintonism and indeed Obama is that the New Deal was a failure. Reaganites cheer that fact while the Clintons mourn it but all too often they come around and concede it as a central truth.

Well time to cry bullshit and get out Cousin Teddy's Big Stick and start whaling the crap out of these guys. And if in taking on the economic right a number of triangulating centrists get bruised, well that is what you get for ignoring the excellent advice of 'Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way'.

The New Deal was on balance a Great Deal. It represented a social solution to a myriad of social problems, it was a triumph of 'We' over 'Me', and yet largely 'We' have just let its legacy go into the shade. Personally I have long pushed the idea that Social Security Solvency, once accepted, is the Big Stick. It is all well and good to have gotten the concept of 'There is no crisis' across, but we need to get beyond that to 'It's not broke, and those that tell you it is are big fat liars'. Thanks to the huge productivity sag since 2003 and the vast lack of grownup oversight that has led to the housing crash, the fundamental health of Social Security and on financial grounds Medicare has been relatively obscured. But the numbers themselves are holding up quite well, there is a lot of resilience built into the system. The projected numbers going forward are so ridiculously pessimistic that even a moderately prolonged recession won't derail solvency at this point. Certainly a flatline 2008 would probably remove the Big Stick as a weapon in this election cycle, but Low Cost is Out There.

I did some kind of crude but I think sound modeling of how sensitive Intermediate Cost was to varying levels of GDP growth over the near term (2008-2012). And the answer turned out to be 'very sensitive'. You can take a roughly 20% slowdown from 2006 numbers and 'crisis' still cracks apart. FDR may not quite be ready to rumble in 2008, but watch out for 2010.

(The Treasury will report year end Trust Fund balances on the last working day of this month. November numbers were strong but not as strong as October's suggested they would be on the OAS side. We'll see how the disappointing December job creation numbers shake out but taken as a whole it looks almost guaranteed that year end balances will exceed projections. As Dr. Frankenstein once told us: "IT'S ALIVE")

[save_the_rustbelt]

The only problem with this is that bridge and road building is now complex capital equipment intensive and almost all labor in the regions needing it most is limited to the trade unions.

Not that there isn't value, when trade unionists bring home substantial checks the ripple effect of their spending has tremendous benefits in a community.

And there are ripples in steel, concrete, asphalt, aggregates, painters, signage, lighting, and etc.

[save_the_rustbelt]

The only problem with this is that bridge and road building is now complex capital equipment intensive and almost all labor in the regions needing it most is limited to the trade unions.

Not that there isn't value, when trade unionists bring home substantial checks the ripple effect of their spending has tremendous benefits in a community.

And there are ripples in steel, concrete, asphalt, aggregates, painters, signage, lighting, and etc.

[bakho]

A crowning jewel on the New Deal was the GI Bill, passed in 1944. Instead of sending veterans back to rural areas with no jobs, the GI Bill provided college training and home loans to afford housing near to jobs. The GI Bill hugely expanded the American University system and prepared our workforce for high productivity jobs.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Bakho:

Since we do not have 14 million veterans, where should we target the college money?

By income, by race, by geography, accross the board....?

[ken melvin]

Beautiful!

The GI Bill was an example of an investment that paid great dividends. I'm sure there are many other possibilities. Some are attractive even as alternatives.

[STS]

Great post, and very timely.

There is a full-court press right-wing attack on the legacy of FDR going on right now. This ranges from the semi-respectable (see Amity Schlaes' recent book) to the slapstick (Jonah Goldberg, um, why was Mussolini called a fascist?). But the theme is the same: FDR = statism = fascism = mass death. You ... are ... getting ... veeery ... sleepy ...

It's time every American started thinking carefully about where they stand on the question of FDR and the New Deal.

Back in the early Reagan years, in battles over the idea of nuclear disarmament we heard yowls from the right wing about the danger of "moral equivalence" -- outrage at the very notion of negotiating with the Brezhnev-era bureaucratic kleptocracy as if they represented any legitimate interests (like the lives of 100+ million residents of the USSR).

Now we are treated to the charming prospect of perfect moral equivalence between FDR and Hitler and Stalin. As if that small matter of WWII, the Holocaust and the Gulag had no moral significance compared with the shocking abuses of high tax rates on wealthy people and direct state intervention on public works.

I sincerely hope we won't get into the situation we were in back in 1932 and nothing on the scale of the New Deal is ever needed again. Personally I think regulatory institutions like the SEC/FDIC etc plus basic social insurance like Social Security (and the never-quite-achieved health insurance) are more central to the legacy of FDR than public works. But there are forces on the right ready and willing to throw us into 20+% unemployment if "that's what it takes" to avoid having to pay high income taxes again. I'm hoping WF Buckley's recent endorsement of Federal intervention to help with bailing out subprime borrowers (http://tinyurl.com/29zqko) tells us all we need to know about their prospects of success.

Now if only ol' Bill Buckley would call off the dogs of "Librul Fascism".

[ken melvin]

So, which of the three will be the much needed FDR?

[Winston]

I really wonder if the new deal projects were a good deal in their own right. Most of the new deal era stuff around me was uglier and less useful than what was built in the 1920's or the 1950's. I'm not sure that new deal era public works are even worth preserving, much less replicating.

[STS]

Ken Melvin:

Assuming by this:

"So, which of the three will be the much needed FDR?"

you are asking about the Democratic nomination race, I'm not at all sure.

Where's a good "traitor to his class" when you need him?

Edwards has a little of that, but the media seem to have snuffed him already. Clinton is very cautious but I think she would go in roughly the right direction. Obama's record is something we all need to study more closely. He has the potential to be a real game changer provided he could a) get elected, b) actually be a tough negotiator rather than getting sucked into phony "bipartisanship" which simply averages a hard-line right wing position and a moderately conservative "left wing" view into status quo corporatism.

It's important to remember that "great men" are made by circumstances -- at least to some degree. A lot depends on the course of the economy and what type of jam we're in when the votes are cast this November.

[Gene O'Grady]

It may be a bit of bathos after some of the above comments, but when the tiger story from the SF Zoo broke one of my first thoughts was fear lest the fallout from the incident close off even more of the wonderful WPA constructions and art works in and around the zoo from public view.

[NoeValleyJim]

"Most of the new deal era stuff around me was uglier and less useful than what was built in the 1920's or the 1950's."

Here in San Francisco we have amazingly beautiful public works like the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, and The Bay Bridge, along with great public art like Diego Rivera murals, the WPA murals in various locations around town and some very useful stuff like the San Francisco Mint and The San Francisco Community College, all built during the New Deal.

[paine]

" beyond irrational opposition stemming for Herbert Hoover do-nothingism"
this is not so

hoover failed not out of passivity
but because of the magnitutde of the task

the lesson to carry forward here
is just how unable to cope
the entire policy establishment really was

including fdr's orthodox advisers

btw the nra was pure vaudeville
but hope heals too
placebos have real effects

[paine]

"the New Deal was a failure"

no the great society was a failure

why ??

unlike fdr's great new deal institutions
other then the medicare program
itself a new deal orphan
the rest of the great society
means tested but not merit based welfare net
was a great humane aspiration
that proved politically
as unsustainable as lbj's nam war

[anne]

Paul Krugman, also calls attention to what I find an astonishing and disheartening comment by Barack Obama likening himself to Ronald Reagan. I do not wish a turn from George Bush to Reagan, and find the idea frightening especially so coming from a Democrat who has been decidedly sounding more like a Republican at each turn.

[anne]

What is the point of supporting a Democrat who is playing Republican more with each day? I want a Franklin Roosevelt and not a Ronald Reagan, but Barack Obama is sounding more like Reagan. While attacking Social Security, setting out an unworkable health care insurance plane, failing to respond to the crisi created by unfair mortgage lending, heding on leaving Iraq, while promising to ring Iraq with American soldiers and to add 100,000 soldiers to our forces, threatening Pakistan, and on, is no idea I have of a President.

[anne]

Hack, we already have George Bush. I want a change and not a slogan of change.

[Winston]

NoeValleyJim,

You've actually proven my point about the new deal make-work projects. The Golden Gate bridge was designed and financed before the New Deal (The financing was put in place in 1930, before FDR and construction began before he took office). The same is the case for the Bay Bridge, which was also paid for (and mostly built) before the new deal. The Coit tower was the result of Lillie Hitchcock Coit deciding to build a monument to her ego (in 1933, again, unrelated the new deal) and was of dubious aesthetic and practical value. As for the San Francisco mint and the WPA and Diego Rivera murals, they are exactly the kind of unfortunate, value subtracting, civic scar that I was criticizing.

[Winston]

To expand, compare the old San Francisco mint to the hideous 1930's building that replaced it, and I think my point will be made more clear.

[DRR]

If we want to talk about what the New Deal "meant" in that in somehow changed our national mentality I can certainly see merit in that, but there's no need to get huffy at those who point out the obvious. I think the New Deal's greatest triumph was that it all but built the regulatory institutions we would be foolish to do without today, but praising the New Deal because it took a lot of unemployed and idle working men and kept them busy making pretty parks and bridges and stuff. Not that pretty parks and bridges aren't nice, but I don't think a convincing case could be made that absent FDR and the New Deal we would be dealing with a bridge and pretty park crisis.

And threats of violence for saying otherwise aside, it still bears mentioning that the "New Deal" did not lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression in any meaningful sense. A strong case could be made that it kept it from worsening as certain progressive economists maintain, and it certainly didn't "cause" the depression as many dishonest right-wing hack economists maintain but was not the engine that brought the U.S. out of it's economic malaise, save for the regulatory frame that would be the ground work for a saner managed capitalism in the decades to come.

[Winston]

I agree that it didn't cause the depression, but it seems like most of the make-work projects of the new-deal contributed neither to our nation's productive capacity nor to its beauty. I'm mostly criticizing the waste that came with the new deal. Bank insurance, the 30 year fully amortizing mortgages and a bunch of other financial innovations were essential for creating the modern world, but most of what was done by the WPA and CCC was of limited value at best and was often destructive at worst.

[Kaleberg]

The New Deal didn't lift the US out of the Great Depression, only Prozac could do that, but it did get my father a great bull market, a rising standard of living after the collapse of the Roaring 20s and all sorts of publics works that we still rely on. Check the stock market figures and you'll see the 30s boom, with a downtick in '37. Check the GDP figures and it also went up and up.

Right now I am typing on a computer using electricity from a New Deal hydro-electric dam. The main road out here was a New Deal make work project, but we still use it. Look at what's left of the American middle class. There was no real middle class before the New Deal. There was a minuscule business class, the rich, and everyone else was working class or poor.

It's high time our nation did something for the middle class again. It has been neglected way too long.

[Real Person from the Real World]

My parents were older and users of parks etc, built during the New Deal as from the depression and when they grew up. I was always aware especially of some of the public and other art (Dorthea Lang, Thomas Hart Benton, et al), and when conservatives tout free markets or bad mouth FDR, I have commented that the gov't not entrepreneurs out for a buck, built an infrastructure that would cost a fortune today but which we all enjoy. You can tell, here in Chicago at least, the parks from back then.... they have that Frank Lloyd Wright Prarie style look to any buildings. Yes, it was a triumph of "us" over "me."

[ken melvin]

I assume there was benefit to giving people jobs.

[ken melvin]

I assume there was benefit to giving people jobs.

[bakho]

To be fair "Clinton-ism" should include his failed attempt to expand the New Deal to institute universal health care coverage. That effort was defeated. However, parts of the Health Care were implemented with SCHIP. Under Clinton, the EITC was expanded and health care and day care expanded to low income workers. Clinton lacked the legislative majority that FDR had.

Even Bush expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs. Disregarding that the Bush expansion was riddled with corruption and poor implementation.

says...

FDR? The American president was a model for a "third way". Neither Soviet styled communism nor German/Italian fascism were to be the road for Depression plagued US. That's why it is so difficult to read American conservatives attack this historic period, which many still think was America's bright shining moment on the world stage. FDR was evidence of what the Right wants to destroy… that Americans are confident, inventive, optimistic and cheerful participants in their institutions and government. But the Right wants an introverted paranoid nation of compliant, obedient, browbeaten "citizens" whose very identity they want to re-design. Since the Cultural Revolution in China there has never been a larger project of deliberate social engineering on a mass scale than the project of the American conservative movement. But they pint the finger at FDR!!!

The lessons of the FDR reforms for those of us who have lived elsewhere in the world are often as political and ideological as they were economic.

In Mexico "our FDR" was Lázaro Cardenas. He was president of a conflict-ridden post revolutionary modern state that was a 19th century country facing a mid 20th century world. Like FDR, Cardenas used public works as a broad instrument to achieve multiple goals. Yes we got dams and highways, irrigation and hospitals, labor rights and social security, etc. We also got a mid 20th century identity hitched to the modern state and (regrettably?) a one party system that assured tranquil and predictable successions of executive power.

It's what we didn't get that I think deserves noting. We did not get fascism or totalitarianism or command and control economy. Planning became essential as did federal finances for development, but property remained constitutionally protected as did the private appropriation of profit from enterprise. Mexico became a Latin American leader thanks to Cardenas and his healthy nationalism allowed for the securing of petroleum resources and state involvement in key sectors (rail, water, communications, etc.) Statist? Yes! And so that model had its end. But most importantly the vehicle of public works remains central to the project of recovery and revamping. Amartya Sen shows how public works can be used effectively to stave off the worst cataclysm- famine. We should reconsider the conservative prohibition against state involvement in the economy.

Today we need a third way again (not a Tony Blair rhetorical one). We need a real choice between the ideological extreme of neo-liberal reforms ("shock therapy", privatization, de-regulation, free trade) on the one hand and old school statism on the other.

If this country were not as psychologically underdeveloped as it is, we would see HUGE new ideas that would address most of the challenges facing this system today.

Some of my bright students ask:
Why do corporations have to exist at all? Aren't their concrete objectives similar to those everyone has? If so, why can't they be ephemeral? Temporary? like a public works project. Once done, it’s done! Eternalism is a problem in the real world.

Why do we tax work along with wealth? Doesn't "income" blur the difference between the sources of the income? Work is already taxing, tax it again? Ugh.

Why do we think owning a home is so important? Isn't home ownership the reason for sprawl, suburban boredom, too many cars, recreational shopping, and ridiculous consumerism? Why can't we rent many the things we need, including the programs on our computers.

Why is car ownership so good? Most cars spend their lives parked, waiting for the indebted owner to move it somewhere and park again.

Why do our houses have one source of water? Why do we use drinking water to wash the car, flush the toilet, and water the lawn?

Why can't people have a single health plan and retirement plan that follows them wherever they go, whichever job they have, even if they don’t have a job for a while?

Why do employers have to pay into accounts for people who haven't worked for them in years? Can't these be pooled and paid for by the whole rather than a single company?

Why do we have environmental impact reports but not economic or social impact reports?

Why do we punish small businesses when they grow from very small to small by charging them so many fees and taxes and premiums and other requirements that they are better off not growing?

Why aren't workers encouraged to buy/invest in the companies they work for? Why doesn't management provide labor with a seat at the table? Why is the relationship necessarily adversarial?

Why is service to the country seen only in those who join the military? Can't we have medical service? Educational service? Economic service? Why can't young people get federal government guarantees for higher education in exchange for a two year service obligation at home or abroad?

Why are we as averse to uniform standards in elections and for such things as drivers' licenses? Is it really oppressive? Most other free countries seem to do fine with national ID cards. And their elections show higher turnouts than ours.

Why do we get such short vacations? Doesn't prosperity mean that time is used more for leisure and less for work? Money is nice, but with no time to spend it, money is nothing.

[Gene O'Grady]

No accounting for taste, but for my money little beats the WPA murals in Coit Tower and the Beach Chalet in SF, or the old nursing room, now the gift shop, at the SF zoo, which I'm pretty sure is also WPA. In point of fact I'm pretty sure the Diego Rivera mural at the Art Institute is pre-New Deal, and I actually like the stuff by his American successors better.

I actually like the 30's mint, not as much as the pre-1906 one, but the building from that era that I really love is the old Rincon Annex Post Office , although it's murals are from post World War II (as the style makes clear). Perhaps Professor Thoma is familiar with the New Deal murals in Eugene?

WPA aside, and the guide books are still wonderful, the real New Deal projects I'm grateful for are the hundreds of unassuming (well, I guess Timberline Lodge isn't unassuming) trails and small scale improvements that make Western (at least parks) more accessible to the common man, woman, or family. Depressing contrast to the destination resorts that have blighted the landscape in the last 25 years.

[Scorpio]

Kansas City has some wonderful New Deal projects that survive, including parts of Swope Park.