- 90 years ago, times were tough.

The stock market crashed.

Banks were unstable.

Unemployment soared.

The world slid into an economic depression.

Northwest farms, timber camps and mines were hard hit.

Hooverville sprouted along Puget Sound.

The hungry and unemployed marched on capitols in both Washingtons.

Climate refugees fled the Dust Bowl.

But in 1933, an ambitious effort to turn things around began and it set off a decade of change that utterly transformed the Pacific Northwest.

(quirky music) Every day, those of us in Washington state are still impacted by the New Deal.

A multi-pronged program to lift America out of the Great Depression.

In 1933, the newly elected president Franklin D Roosevelt initiated a series of federal programs and agencies to provide jobs and build the country's physical and social infrastructure.

In the West, it sought to pull the region from the frontier period into a new, modern century.

Its scope covered projects, great and small.

From building the massive Grand Coulee Dam to constructing outhouses for farm workers.

The New Deals water projects resulted in irrigation that caused deserts to bloom into more fertile land.

The list of New Deal infrastructure work seems endless as the government sought to employ as many of the unemployed as possible with jobs generated by local project needs.

According to the University of Washington the New Deal built, or funded, 28,000 miles of road, 1000 bridges, 26 libraries, 193 parks, 380 miles of sewers, 15,500 traffic signs, 90 stadiums, and 760 miles of water mains in Washington alone.

The bridges included: The first Lake Washington floating bridge.

The first Tacoma Narrows bridge.

Oops.

The Deception Pass bridges.

The rebuilds of Seattle's Ballard and Fremont Bridges.

To name a few.

The Civilian Conservation Corps provided manpower to build roads, campsites, shelters and trails for national, state, and local parks.

A military style organization, the CCC, sent mostly young men into the wilderness to make it more accessible to the public.

To improve the environment and provide unemployed youths with work and income for their families.

CCC crews fought forest fires, built lookouts and rebuilt the dykes that had breached and resulted in displacement of thousands during the great Kelso flood of 1933.

They planted millions of trees and installed utilities in places like Mount Rainier and the brand new Olympic National Park, which Roosevelt signed into existence.

An Indian division of the CCC was recruited to work to improve tribal lands.

Black workers were hired too, though they worked in segregated crews.

They produced artistic murals, formed a black theater troop that put on plays in Washington.

Writers were hired to produce detailed histories and guidebooks for each state.

They landscaped the University of Washington, the Washington Park Arboretum, and Woodland Park Zoo.

They funded racially integrated low income housing project, like Seattle's Yesler Terrace.

Among the first of its kind.

They built airports in Spokane and Everett.

They raised transmission lines for rural electrification.

They built housing for migrant workers and helped resettle climate refugees.

Their work was not without critics.

A Republican candidate in Grays Harbor called the New Deal, "Hitler in the Woods" claiming it would bring socialism to the timber business.

The Communist Party argued the New Deal was an attack on living standards and would fuel more Imperial Wars.

Republicans criticized the spending and government overreach.

Private power companies oppose public power projects like Grand Coulee.

Roosevelt came to the northwest to see his New Deal in action in 1937.

After a tour of the Olympic Peninsula, he visited Grand Coulee, the federal project's colossal centerpiece.

F.D.R believed hydroelectric power would transform the West's wasteland.

Whole new communities had been built for the dams workforce and the boom town of Grand Coulee itself became known for sin and vice and earned the title "Cesspool of the New Deal".

Nine towns along the river had to be relocated because of the project.

An estimated 8,000 workers were employed building the dam.

12 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to build a sidewalk that could circle the globe twice went into it.

77 lost their lives in its construction.

Today it irrigates 670,000 acres of land and produces 21 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

Smithsonian Magazine has called Grand Coulee the greatest monument to the New Deal's epic remaking of the American landscape.

Folk singer Woody Guthrie was hired to sing the praises of New Deal dams.

He wrote 26 songs in 30 days for $266.

* Roll on Columbia roll on.

* Your power is turning our darkness to dawn * * Roll on Columbia roll on.

- But despite Woody's theme music, the New Deal had its downsides.

Its dams did enormous damage to the once robust salmon runs blocking the fish from returning to their spawning grounds.

They flooded tribal lands in sacred places, like Kettle Falls where indigenous people had gathered for millennia.

The environmental impact of large projects was largely ignored as ecosystems were disrupted.

Roll on Columbia today, is about tragedy as well as triumph.

Grand Coulee enabled Hanford, which produced fuel for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

Its waste poses a threat to this day.

The Atomic Age and the industrialization of the Northwest has had impacts that will test our adaptability and quality of life for generations to come.

Perhaps even our survival.

Still one wonders where would we be without the New Deals upsides.

We can take heart that we're capable of rising to huge challenges when crises arise.

Even those that were, and are, mostly manmade.

(ominous music) - [Female Narrator] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback Podcast.

Just search Mossback wherever you listen.