But nothing did so much to freshen the fading memory of the New Deal as hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In their ruinous wake, liberal commentators called for similar federal activism to rebuild the South while reactionaries sought to tamp back its dreaded specter into the tomb of forgetfulness.

Among the latter, New York Times columnist John Tierney predicted ("Losing the Faith," Sept. 24) that the "1930s nostalgia craze" would quickly founder on the rocks of a public cynicism to which he added his own weighty boulders. Tierney related how he had lost faith in government after working with a federal antipoverty program in the 1970s. There, he witnessed bored teenagers paid to do little or nothing. Tierney gratifyingly cited a Pew Research Center poll, which found that 56 percent of Americans after Katrina thought government almost always wasteful and inefficient. The Bush administration's calamitous bungling of a natural catastrophe, according to conservatives such as Tierney, only buttressed their own ideological antipathy to the shared risks and responsibilities inherent in New Deal programs. A Louisiana laborer told the columnist that government's unresponsiveness taught him that "The lesson is to save money and be self-reliant." John Wayne rides again.

A 1939 Dorothea Lange photograph reminded me that Tierney's tale of redundant teens was as stale as those of FDR's enemies, who savaged the Works Progress Administration for useless make-work projects. Lange's camera captured a 1939 parade of WPA laborers in San Francisco protesting congressional funding cutbacks. One carried a sign asking, "Was the Cow Palace Built Leaning on Shovels?" (a reference to the city-owned exhibition building that has been paying dividends since it opened in 1941 by hosting everything from Republican Party conventions to Billy Graham revivals, rodeos and the Beatles). Few know that federal workers and grants built the Cow Palace, and that they did so with not a whiff of graft. As waves of corruption and mismanagement charges engulf the present administration, those who have lost faith in government cannot conceive of a regime notable for little scandal even as it employed millions of men and women on public-works projects.

For most Americans, the ubiquitous public landscape of the New Deal is as invisible as it is essential for the functioning of a modern nation. One of the New Deal's first alphabet soup agencies -- the Civil Works Administration -- lasted only for the dire winter of 1933-34. Within three weeks, CWA Director Harry Hopkins put 2 million people to work, a number that soon doubled as legions of laborers built or repaired more than 800 airports, 3,700 athletic fields and 255,000 miles of roads. Demonstrating a commitment to public education characteristic of subsequent New Deal programs, the CWA built or modernized 4,000 school buildings, hired 50,000 teachers for rural schools, and controversially employed about 3,000 artists and writers who, Hopkins insisted, "had to eat, too."

In the coming years, Hopkins' CWA and the Public Works Administration (under "Honest" Harold Ickes) put millions more to work building a network of levees, roads, airports, military bases, schools, community colleges, civic auditoriums, water-delivery systems, sewers, hospitals, zoos and parks still in use today. New Deal workers restored the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument and San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, and they built the Triborough and San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges, the Lincoln Tunnel, TVA dams, Treasure Island and the spectacular Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood. Without WPA flood-control projects, last winter's storms would have devastated Southern California at a cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers and insurance companies.

Civilian Conservation Corps "boys" stationed in thousands of rural camps meanwhile reforested the nation and clocked in 6.5 million days fighting forest fires. They built 204 museums, restored almost 4,000 historic buildings and constructed 3,116 fire towers and more than 46,000 bridges. While saving families and individuals from destitution, the CCC made the nation's proliferating parklands so gracefully accessible that few who use them are aware of the peacetime "tree army's" heroic contributions to our collective well-being.

FDR called upon Americans to overcome their fear even as his works programs vastly enlarged the public domain, providing them with a multitude of spaces in which to come together both as citizens and as a national community. By remembering the optimism, the wit, and the demonstrable compassion with which he led the nation through the twin calamities of depression and world war, we can better measure what recent administrations lack, as well as the quality we have forgotten to demand. Those who -- like Tierney -- have lost their faith in what government can accomplish for the common good have but to look around themselves to regain it. The evidence of intelligent design is everywhere; it bears the name of Roosevelt, and it points to the future we could have if we but remembered we once had it.

Gray Brechin is project scholar and writer for the New Deal Legacy Project (www.newdealproject.org), which is documenting the physical legacy of the New Deal in California under the aegis of the California Historical Society.

© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle