Nick Taylor

This story arrived by email over the weekend. It's another example of the WPA's extraordinary work in rescuing America, and Americans, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. I'm posting it with the writer's permission.

Dear Nick,

I'm glad you have written about the WPA.

I wanted to tell you my story because if it wasn't for the WPA, I would not be alive today. It took a miracle to save me. Timing is everything in this story.

We lived in the hills of NE Washington. My mother was pregnant with my brother. She was alone on this day. As she had a bad heart, she tired easily and for the first time she sent me up to the outdoor toilet alone. I could not have been more than 3 years old. When she realized that I had not come back, she raced up the hill and discovered that I had fallen in the toilet. I was sinking fast. It just happened that on that day the WPA was working on our road. She stood in the road and screamed. A huge black man came running and lifted the toilet off the hole and rescued me. She said it took the rest of the day to clean up both of us as she had to pack water and heat it on a wood stove. So I have a soft spot for the WPA and a thanks to that president. I'm also famous in our family for this event and it has generated a lot of laughter. It is told at family parties and whenever new people come around. I quietly thank God for my life.

Madeline Kjolseth
Anderson Island, WA

Greetings, friends! May I address
A selection process that’s a mess,
And the candidates involved
Who pledge to get our problems solved?

They’re from the right, that’s very clear.
That’s why their stock in trade is fear.
They talk about the deficit,
But don’t say they created it.

They all say taxes are just bad,
Don’t take from rich folks what they’ve had.
Just starve the poor and middle-class.
Who cares if the wealth gap is so vast?

Let’s start with Mitt, the man of Romney, (more…)

I love New York. A weekend ago, on October 1, I walked through Washington Square Park and encountered a bunch of people with dachshunds. This weekend the park was full of Occupy Wall Street protesters who had moved uptown for the day, probably to let their bedding air out. Only in New York will you find events focusing on low-slung sausage dogs and high-flung profit hogs taking place in the identical place a week apart. (more…)

In the late summer of 1935, two and a half years into his first term, President Franklin Roosevelt was finally launching a serious program to put Americans back to work. The Works Progress Administration was an admission that the piecemeal and temporary programs that preceded it had failed to spark the economy back to life. (more…)