Camarillo State Hospital was one of the many wonders created by WPA funds. There was a tear in my eye when I recently visited California State University, Channel Islands — formerly Camarillo State Hospital — and saw the beautiful Spanish buildings that comprised the hospital being torn down and replaced with more contemporary-style buildings. A memorable historical complex reminiscent of the era of the Great Depression was lost.

In his publication, Hightower writes, “In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt launched one of the biggest, most successful public-infrastructure program in U.S. history, the Works Progress Administration, which put 3.5 million hard-hit, unemployed Americans to work in every locality in the nation.�

My father was one of the 3.5 million beautifying the parks in Minneapolis, my hometown. The Beverly Hills Post Office has beautiful murals decorating their lobby, painted by WPA artists. The WPA built bridges, airport runways, thousands of public buildings, hospitals, 650,000 miles of roads, 8,000 parks, 4,383 new schools and 9,000 miles of sewer lines at a cost of $11.4 billion, slightly half of the $335 billion that we’ve spent on the war in Iraq. And we didn’t have the terrible deficit in the 1930s that we have today.

—Samuel M. Rosen, Newbury Park