Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

Between 1935 and 1943, the Works Progress Administration funded the construction of this now-overgrown roadside park on U.S. Highway 59, about a mile from the intersection with Interstate 29 at mile marker 65. LEFT: This stone marker is one of several fireplace grills that still stand as a silent testament to the activity that once occurred here. CENTER: A pedestrian bridge still spans a creek bisecting the park, though rotting planks make the structure a danger. RIGHT: A signpost that has lost its purpose lies near downed tree trunks and an overflowing trash can.

Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

The Agency Community Center & City Hall was built with Works Progress Administration funds. Many of the original architectural details of the building have been lost to renovations.

In a time of soup lines, Franklin D. Roosevelt brought Americans the alphabet soup.

The 32nd president gave rise to federal programs recognized by their initials, CCC, WPA, PWA and FERA, among others. They came about in an attempt to restore the nation during the Great Depression.

Seven decades later, as a new president faces a struggling economy and considers a public works remedy for rising unemployment, remnants of the “alphabet-soup agencies” exist in bricks and memory in St. Joseph and around the region.

Find New Deal construction in Hiawatha, Kan., where a plaque on the National Guard Armory credits the Works Progress Administration for its construction in 1939. A year later, WPA money went toward building the Harrison County Courthouse in Bethany, Mo.

In St. Joseph, the WPA provided funds to build, in 1938, a fire station on South 11th Street; it now houses the St. Joseph Fire Museum. The same federal agency supplied 45 percent of the funds for civic improvements at 10th Street and Frederick Avenue; the city unveiled the Pony Express Statue there in April 1940.

Murals that line the walls of the St. Joseph post office, 12 panels created by Swedish-born artist Gustaf Dalstrom, came about because of the WPA’s Federal Arts Project.

As was the case with Mr. Dalstrom, and about 8.5 million other Americans during the WPA’s eight-year run, the federal programs put people to work during a time when jobless rates approached 25 percent.

Everett Smith joined the Civilian Conservation Corps at age 17 and went to work in 1938 in the Loess Hills State Forest in west-central Iowa.

“With the training I got there in automotive and tractor maintenance, it was the hub of my entire working life,” the St. Joseph man said.

Not all historians agree on the effectiveness of the New Deal programs, just as not all contemporary observers agree on the blue-sky forecasts for Mr. Obama’s proposals.

At least some found relief where relief was intended during the Depression years. In his book “Poetry of the People,” Donald W. Whisenhunt located some verse in the Roosevelt Presidential Library sent to the president by an uncredited St. Joseph poet. In part, it read:

What would happen to the poor man of today

If it wasn’t for the W.P.A.

The Republicans all yelp

Cause the poor man’s getting help.

* * * * *

The stone wall stands overlooking the Missouri River, an imposing structure meant apparently to stop washouts from the bluffs in the northwestern part of St. Joseph.

But vines now grow among the native rocks, and a pile of trash sits at the base of the structure just south of Wyeth Hill.

Gary Chilcote, Patee House Museum director, shows a picture of the wall as it looked before World War II, The photo’s tag line indicates the wall’s construction by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had established a camp on the hillside above Waterworks Road.

“This was a government project to build this humongous wall, and that’s an example of some of the things they did,” Mr. Chilcote said. “How many unemployed people did it take to build that thing?”

That was the point. The Roosevelt administration started the CCC and other programs as a means of getting people a paycheck. The president, in a letter to the Works Progress Administration administrator, wrote: “I was convinced that providing useful work is superior to any and every kind of dole.”

The WPA, which lasted from July 1, 1935, to June 30, 1943, left an economic imprint on Missouri. According to a government document called “A Final Report on the WPA Program,” the state benefited from 476,337 man-years of employment. At its height in 1938, the program had 112,757 workers in Missouri. The earnings totaled $269.4 million, or more than $3.2 billion in today’s dollars.

For the money, the state got 24,399 miles of roads, 2,306 bridges and viaducts, 1,137 new or reconstructed schools and 1,152 new or rebuilt other structures.

Rosecrans Field got a large hangar, thanks to the WPA; it survived until the 1993 flood led to its demolition.

“It was labor-intensive back in those days. They didn’t have much equipment,” Mr. Chilcote said. “It was on purpose so lots of people would have jobs.”

Patrick McLear, a Missouri Western State University historian with published works about America in the 1930s, sees significant differences between the New Deal era and the nation’s current dilemma.

Dr. McLear considers Mr. Roosevelt a pragmatist who had no real enthusiasm for creating a jobs program when he took office in 1933. The president wanted nothing to do with a large bureaucracy, the professor said, and knew from a political standpoint the workers would turn angry once laid off from the temporary government jobs.

“Pretty soon, you have an army voting against you,” he said.

Mr. Roosevelt addressed first the business problems with such measures as the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. When this action and others failed to help ordinary Americans, and with the next campaign cycle approaching, he yielded to advisers promoting a make-work organization.

“The WPA is a re-election gimmick as much as anything,” Dr. McLear said.

Stories proliferated about the nature of the projects, the tales of workers digging holes and then filling them becoming part of New Deal folklore. Editorial cartoonists made the WPA initials stand for “We Poke Along.” Dr. McLear saw some value in what came from the New Deal endeavors.

“The WPA employed people at below the going pay rate,” the professor said. “We got all these public projects for a fraction of the cost.”

Mr. Obama has no such luxury in 2009, Dr. McLear said. Federal outlays will meet union wages, plus a profit built in for contractors. And economic woes of a different sort might result if too much government spending creates inflation.

“Obama’s not worried. I’m terrified,” Dr. McLear said. “Under Jimmy Carter, they dumped us into an inflationary spiral that almost wrecked the country.”

* * * * *

A month after his election, Mr. Obama pledged to launch the largest public-works project since Dwight Eisenhower initiated the interstate highway system. He hoped 2.5 million jobs would come from the effort.

Along with new buildings, roadways and sewer lines, the work would focus on a “green infrastructure” that includes energy-efficient construction. Almost two months later, the expectations, the jobless rates and the price tag have risen.

In the economic stimulus bill that passed the U.S. House last week, the word “jobs” and “infrastructure” appear repeatedly, though specifics seem in short supply. In voting against the measure, Northwest Missouri Congressman Sam Graves said job creation remains best in the private sector.

“We’re not getting much for the amount of spending that’s taking place,” he said.

The U.S. Senate has yet to sign off on the stimulus bill. If the measure becomes law, states and communities must compete for the federal money made available for, to use the latest catchphrase, “shovel-ready projects.”

Trent Lehman, one of the federal lobbyists hired by St. Joseph interests, emphasized the stimulus package represents no grab bag of dollars.

“Everybody thinks the skies are going to open and money will rain down,” he said in a visit to the city on Thursday.

Around the region, the results of an earlier public-works program still stand. What future generations will see of the current economic travails remains to be known.

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.