Seventy-five years ago, in March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president amid the gravest economic crisis in the nation’s history. The Depression that began with, but was not necessarily caused by, the collapse of the stock market in 1929 was now pulling banks, farms and businesses into a swirling vortex. Unemployment ratcheted up to 25 percent.

FDR’s response was to try something, anything, to get people working again. Congress agreed to put the federal government in debt to create jobs, and in 1935, the Works Progress Administration started to “make the dirt fly,” in the president’s words. Before it officially closed in 1943, the workers hired and paid by the WPA built countless roads, stadiums, libraries, parks, New York’s LaGuardia Airport and San Antonio’s River Walk.

In American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR Put the Nation to Work, writer Nick Taylor revels in the sprawling construction statistics. Nonetheless, he gives space in this story to the WPA’s critics in Congress, who insisted that those initials stood for “We Piddle Around” and that Communists had infiltrated the agency. He also touches on the continued rate of joblessness, which persisted despite Roosevelt’s efforts.

The New Deal’s job creation, if it failed in the aggregate, succeeded in the particular. Taylor, a writer of popular nonfiction and co-author of John Glenn’s memoir, puts a human face on the WPA through interviews with the folks who got government paychecks and their dignity back. “It wasn’t no different than no other job,” said Johnny Mills, who dug out embankments and shoveled gravel to widen roads in the North Carolina mountains. “You earned the money. I always tried to make a living for my family. And it was help to us.” Taylor’s second hero, after President Roosevelt, is Harry Hopkins, who ran the New Deal relief efforts for almost six years. Taylor gives a rich portrait of this great public servant, a rare bureaucrat who spoke his mind against his relentless critics. His resignation at the end of 1938 is as good a place as any to declare the New Deal over, as Taylor does. Nine months later, Hitler’s armies marched into Poland and began the conquest of Europe. Taylor acknowledges that the economic engine of manufacture for World War II brought unemployment down to single digits.

Taylor does not enter the debate over whether the New Deal amounted to another American revolution by intruding federal powers into political, social and personal matters. But in his sketches of New Deal relief programs, one can readily find the idea of government responsibility for individual well-being and welfare. Did the government’s involvement in a job creation program lead to today’s federal presence in education? Should the crisis of 1933-1943 have made the federal government what it later became – a regulator in the banking and securities business, as well as the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy? Those aren’t Taylor’s questions. Instead, he chronicles with engaging detail the work of one New Deal agency that “placed its faith in ordinary men and women [who] proved to be extraordinary beyond all expectations.” James Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

The trouble in dealing with spies and former spies is that one can never be sure when they’re telling the truth and when they’re spinning self-serving fables. After all, their lives and careers have depended on artful and persistent deception. A high-ranking agent for the KGB and later for its post-Cold War successor, the SVR, Sergey Tretyakov defected to the U.S. in October 2000, bringing with him his wife and daughter. Little was revealed about the defection until Tretyakov, now living under cover, asked the FBI and CIA to connect him with Pete Earley, whose book on American spy Aldrich Ames (Confessions of a Spy) he particularly admired.

As it turns out, Tretyakov had been spying for the U.S. well before he walked out on Russia. His reason for changing sides, he tells Earley in Comrade J, was neither job discontent nor hope of financial gain, but rather his disenchantment with what Russia had become under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. (He is equally unimpressed with current Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin, whom he remembers as having had “a nothing career” within the KGB.) Former Washington Post reporter Earley says he conducted 126 hours of face-to-face interviews with Tretyakov, a probing that enables him to describe the Russian’s early life and KGB training, his stint in Canada as a spy and spy recruiter, and his final information-gathering assignments in New York. Tretyakov gives a voluminous accounting of the KGB/SVR personalities he worked with and the brutality of the system he long defended.

Perhaps the most newsworthy element here is Tretyakov’s list of people he says were finessed, tricked, bribed or blackmailed into providing useful—although not always classified – information. One of these sources, he reports, was Strobe Talbott, President Clinton’s deputy secretary of state. Earley dutifully presented Tretyakov’s accusations to Talbott and the other supposed sources – and they, as might be expected, dismissed or denied them without exception. Whatever the truth of his specific assertions, Tretyakov draws a remarkably detailed and engaging diagram of the mechanics of spying.

In this breakneck review of one year of the early 20th century, author Jim Rasenberger reverses the old dictum about journalism being the first draft of history. For him, it’s the last word. Rasenberger, a contributor to the New York Times, looked at every page of that paper’s 1908 run and made forays into newspapers from the provinces. The result, America 1908, is a work with all the breadth and heft of, well a daily newspaper. Then as now, journalism was incapable of understanding the significance of day-to-day happenings and how important (or soon-forgot) they might be.

Of the events mentioned in the book’s subtitle ( The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T, and the Making of a Modern Nation ) only the first was reported firsthand by journalists. The strange and mysterious story of Adm. Peary and Dr. Cook and the drive to the North Pole, Henry Ford’s Model T, the dark years of racial apartheid Rasenberger must take from sources written long after the events of 1908. Factual depth and interpretive range never get in the way of good stories. Nor should they. The author set out to chronicle quixotic and fabulous adventures, and he does. In May, there’s the appearance on the streets of Chicago of one Bertha Carlisle, wearing a tight-fitting, hip-hugging sheath dress. Late summer witnessed the famous episode of Fred Merkle, who failed to tag second base in a decisive game between the Cubs and the Giants, costing his New York club the world championship. We have a three-page account of one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s point-to-point hikes through Rock Creek Park, over under, through obstacles, but never around them. Two pages follow on the return of the Great White Fleet, Roosevelt’s declaration to the world of American naval superiority. The best part of the book is devoted to the Wright brothers, their invention of the airplane, and their intrepid proof to the world of the capability of what they called their machine. Here, the book soars. We are in the cockpit as the modest mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, tip the gossamer wings, climb, dip, turn and set humankind free of gravity.

During the 28-year period between the start of the War for Independence in 1775 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, decisions were made, or avoided, that established the foundation for much that was to follow, for good or ill, in American history. Virtually every one of the major decisions came after vigorous, and often bitter, discussions. In his glorious American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, Joseph Ellis argues that the success of the founders was partially attributable to their ideological and even temperamental diversity. Unlike revolutions in other parts of the world, in America there was never a one-man despot. The American founding was, and still is, a group portrait, Ellis writes.

American Creation focuses on six significant moments with several recurrent themes. First, that John Adams was basically right that the founders were pragmatists, for the most part making it up as they went along. Second, that Washington was correct when he claimed that space was a priceless asset; Ellis believes the most original political contributions made by the founders were offered in response to that unique condition. Third, that controlling the pace of political and social change was critically important. The founders opted for evolutionary rather than a revolutionary approach, Ellis writes. [T]he calculated decision to make the American Revolution happen in slow motion was a creative act of statesmanship that allowed the United States to avoid the bloody and chaotic fate of subsequent revolutionary movements in France, Russia, and China, he argues. However, he adds, thinking that the issue of slavery would die a natural death, proved a massive miscalculation. Ellis believes that the period between 1786 to 1788 is possibly the most creative moment in all of American political history. The climax occurred at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in the summer of 1788 where James Madison and Patrick Henry engaged in what Ellis says is most likely the most consequential debate in American history. In a nutshell, Madison maintained the notion that government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated. The Constitution, in which federal and state authority contend for supremacy, becomes like history itself, an argument without end. Ellis notes that George Washington felt that a truly just Indian policy was one of his highest priorities, that failure on this score would damage his reputation and stain the nation.’ But even Washington, with the strong assistance of Henry Knox, his secretary of war, who was fully prepared to play the role of conscience of the American Revolution, could not prevail. One of the major reasons was Creek Nation leader Alexander McGillivray, who defied all the stereotypes and of whom Ellis says it is difficult to imagine a more capable and shrewd leader. Despite failure, Ellis points to the exceptional quality of leadership on both sides. Ellis’ books on early American history are national treasures. In his latest, his meticulous scholarship and superb narrative skills educate and entertain in the best sense. He is always keenly aware of both the events as they occurred as well as their place in the broader course of history. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.