This story aired in the September 4, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Since taking office, President Trump and his advisers have been focused on shrinking the federal government. But these agencies were actually created from a belief in a more expansive role for the federal government, an idea that can be traced back to the 1930s and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs.
The focus back then was to help the country recover from the Great Depression, but the New Deal is still all around us today.
Our new series, "The Public Works" is all about understanding where the New Deal came from and why it still matters here in the Bay Area. In this first story, reporter Sheryl Kaskowitz learns about the secret messages that the New Deal left behind.
Click the button above to listen!
Story Transcript:
Sound of car driving by
REPORTER: It’s a sunny May afternoon, and I’m on Euclid Street, nearly at the top of the Berkeley Hills. I’m here with historian Harvey Smith, and we’re looking down at the Berkeley Rose Garden. It looks almost like an amphitheater, with curved rows of flowers descending along the hill below us.
HARVEY SMITH: So the garden's really in pretty much full bloom now and quite beautiful.
REPORTER: We walk down the steep path toward the gate to get a closer look.
REPORTER: God, you weren't kidding about the roses!
SMITH: Yeah, it’s pretty much full bloom.
REPORTER: Wow.
Sound of metal gate closing and people chatting
REPORTER: The roses are putting on quite a show, with different varieties arranged in a sort of explosion of colors, that cascade down the hill. They really are beautiful, but that’s not why we’re here.
Smith is the author of the book Berkeley and the New Deal, and he agreed to show me a few clues to the garden’s history.
Sound of tennis game
SMITH: So we can hear tennis balls or see people playing tennis.
REPORTER: The first clue is the stone wall at the back of the tennis courts that are right next to the rose garden.
SMITH: And they recently did some renovation on the park. So these surfaces are new and they, they did a lot of work, but here's —
REPORTER: Oh, look at that. Yeah.
REPORTER: In the center of the wall are two small plaques: one says “1934” and a smaller one below it says “C.W.A.”
There’s another of these clues in the garden itself.
Sound of tennis gate closing and walking down steps
REPORTER: We continue down the narrow stone steps, past neat rows of rose bushes, and Smith points to a small metal plaque on a low wall that’s partially covered by vines.
SMITH: There is the sign.
REPORTER: Oh, there it is!
SMITH: Yeah. Yeah.
REPORTER: It's almost swallowed up there.
SMITH: Yeah, yeah. It happens, you know,
REPORTER: This one reads, “constructed by the Works Progress Administration,” with the year.
REPORTER: And that’s 1937. Is that the only little marker? It is very subtle, yes.
SMITH: Yeah. That's the sort of official marker.
REPORTER: It would be easy to miss these plaques — one at the back of the tennis court, and then this one halfway down the steps of the garden, partway hidden by greenery and certainly overshadowed by the roses. It seems likely that most of the tourists and students and locals who come here haven’t noticed them.
But it’s worth diving into their history – which requires going back more than 90 years ago.
After the big stock market crash in 1929, the Great Depression hit people hard. Unemployment was at almost 25%. People couldn’t pay their debts, so banks were failing. Prices for agriculture had dropped so low that farmers would just let their crops rot in the fields, even though people living in cities were starving. Crooners like Rudy Vallee sang of poverty and broken dreams in the song, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
RUDY VALLEE (singing): Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time / Once I built a railroad, now it’s done / Brother, can you spare a dime?
REPORTER: By the 1932 election, people were frustrated that things hadn’t improved.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (archival tape): I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. [applause]
REPORTER: That was Franklin Delano Roosevelt — then governor of New York — accepting his first presidential nomination at the 1932 Democratic National Convention.
FDR won the presidency by a landslide against the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover. And people were hungry for him to do something and roll out this new deal he had promised.
And he did — in fact, Roosevelt coined the term “first 100 days” — a phrase that’s still used today — to highlight how much the government had accomplished in such a short time.
Working with Congress, his administration stabilized the banks by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — what we still hear about from bank ads that assure us, “Member FDIC.” The New Deal mandated government oversight for the securities market and passed regulations for fair wages and prices to stimulate economic recovery.
But for many Americans, the biggest impact of the New Deal came from its work programs — where the federal government hired unemployed people to work on civic projects across the country. It wasn’t anything that the federal government had really done before.
ERIC RAUCHWAY: So it represents a kind of real push forward, a real watershed in the history of the government's relationship to ordinary people.
REPORTER: That’s Eric Rauchway. He’s a history professor at UC Davis and author of Why the New Deal Matters. He says that FDR had tried out the work program idea at the state level as governor of New York, and it became a key part of his philosophy:
RAUCHWAY: That the state was working for people, even as people were working for the state. So that was the core of what he had to offer.
REPORTER: And it wasn’t just one work program — there were several, all part of the “alphabet soup” of New Deal agency acronyms. There was the CCC …
RAUCHWAY: … the Civilian Conservation Corps …
REPORTER: … which sent unemployed young men out to work in nature on conservation projects. The PWA …
RAUCHWAY: … Public Works Administration …
REPORTER: … which did large-scale projects, like bridges and tunnels. There was the CWA (that’s the Civil Works Administration) and later, the WPA (the Works Progress Administration), which employed people to build things like libraries and parks, but also put people to work in offices and schools and recreation centers. The government paid people to sew clothes and repair shoes and toys, make public art and write travel guides and stage plays and concerts. Overall, the WPA employed about 8.5 million people across the country — that’s more than the entire population of California at the time.
DORIAN KIMBALL (archival tape): My daddy got $40 a month.
REPORTER: In the Bay Area, the WPA hired people like Dorian Kimball’s father, whose story is archived at the Western Sonoma County Historical Society. She said it went beyond just putting people to work.
KIMBALL (archival tape): The commodities they gave us, absolutely every material thing anybody would need: in food, clothing, and they even had toys for the children. And they would bring them up on the porch and put these great huge boxes once a month on the porch.
And Walter Wade, in an oral history from the Santa Clara City Library, who said he had friends who worked for the WPA:
WALTER WADE (archival tape): If they didn't have WPA, I don't know how they would have been able to exist and gotten their food.
And there’s labor organizer Walter Thomas Jourdan. In an oral history held at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, he talked with pride about his WPA work building a retaining wall in the channel of the Oakland Municipal airport:
WALTER THOMAS JOURDAN (archival tape): And every stone that was in that wall, I set it.
Sound of metal gate closing, tennis game, and people chatting
REPORTER: And here at the rose garden, there were the CWA workers who built the tennis courts, and the WPA workers who built the garden. So that explains where these plaques come from.
But honestly — the government builds stuff and puts up plaques all the time. Why does it matter?
Here’s Harvey Smith again, explaining why he thinks the “CWA” sign on the tennis court wall is important.
SMITH: The CWA made very few plaques, but the workers were so proud of the work that they did on this stone retaining wall, and they went to a monument maker and had a little plaque made.
REPORTER: They paid for it themselves. I ask him why he thinks the workers went to the trouble.
SMITH: Just to commemorate their work and to, you know, I guess honor what the tennis courts represented. They had a good job that they appreciated and they knew they were contributing to the community.
REPORTER: There were New Deal work projects like this one all across the Bay Area.
Of course, not everyone was on board.
KATHRYN OLMSTED: There was some criticism of the WPA and other public works programs as being inefficient and wasteful.
REPORTER: That's Kathryn Olmsted. She's a history professor at UC Davis and author of the book Right Out of California. There were critics on the left who said wages were too low, and people on the right who used language that might sound familiar today, calling these projects “wasteful.” Some called WPA workers “shovel leaners" and wisecracked that the initials stood for “We Poke Along.”
Conservatives found plenty to dislike about the New Deal overall, but Olmsted says there was actually much less criticism against the WPA than we might imagine.
OLMSTED: Because people could see in their own communities what the New Deal was building.
REPORTER: For FDR and his advisors, building morale was just as important as putting people to work, because New Dealers saw it as key to keeping our democracy safe.
After all, this was right when Hitler was rising to power in Germany.
RAUCHWAY: Roosevelt's essential purpose was to say, “Look, we don't want to go down that road,” right?
Historian Eric Rauchway says, a big part of the New Deal was getting people to commit to the project of democracy.
RAUCHWAY: There was an idea that we would have a shared stake in the public goods, and that therefore we would want to continue to support this common enterprise.
So that’s a lot of what drove the New Deal, and it resonates in what’s been left behind. Here’s how Rauchway sums up why it’s important:
RAUCHWAY: That we have these public institutions and spaces, that derive from the intention to make everyday life — for lack of a better word — nicer for everyone, you know, and it's a fundamentally democratic-with-a-small-D proposition.
REPORTER: “Make everyday life nicer for everyone.” As a slogan, it might not fit on a baseball cap, but it does seem to get at something fundamental about what the New Deal has left us.
Sound of cars and people chatting
REPORTER: Like these roses. Up at the top of the garden on Euclid Street, Harvey Smith and I are taking in the spectacular view.
SMITH: To our left is the Golden Gate Bridge, and then straight in front of us is Mount Tamalpais. And then, of course, in front of all that is the bay. And you can see little parts of Berkeley behind the trees.
REPORTER: Looking out at the bay from up here, I’m realizing that you can actually see the big imprint that the New Deal has left behind. The New Deal built the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, and the roads leading to and from the Golden Gate Bridge.
And that’s just the big stuff. Here in Berkeley, like a lot of towns, the New Deal built government office buildings, public libraries, schools, parks, and playgrounds. And even beyond that, WPA crews planted trees and built sidewalks, and roads, and curbs, and sewers, and all sorts of things that we still use everyday but don’t even think about.
And then there’s the invisible stuff, like social security, unemployment insurance, and labor protections — all of those came out of the New Deal,
Here’s how Rauchway sees it:
RAUCHWAY: The metaphor that I would use is, you know, people sometimes say a fish doesn't know it's wet because it's spent all its time in water, right? We don't realize how much we rely on the New Deal because we are just in it all the time.
Sound of rose garden and tennis
REPORTER: So when you see a WPA plaque, or a mural, or even a stamp that’s left in the sidewalk, it’s like a secret message. It says that about 90 years ago, the federal government hired a crew of unemployed people to, you know, “make everyday life nicer for everyone.” And it’s still here, almost a century later.
Once you understand the history, you can decode the messages. And you’ll start to see them everywhere.
In Berkeley, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz, for Crosscurrents.
This story was supported in part by the Living New Deal.
