1929, the Financial Health of the over and stated stock market plunges into a Great Depression, it grips the world. This land is your land this land is my land from california to the New York Island i want to see my country again holds a prosperity. This land was made for you and me snen send in let me insert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is, fear itself. By the time Franklin Roosevelt gives his 1933 speech, almost a quarter of the nation is unemployed. More than 5,000 banks have failed. The drought is persisting in key agricultural areas in the country. People must have faith. Coming up in a next hour, stories from the Great Depression as we take you around the country to places like oledo. In 1931, five of the six largest banks in toledo failed at the same time. Which made it the largest ranking failure of the Great Depression. To successful Infrastructure Projects impacting us today. And to one ending in tragedy. We will take you to st. Paul, where depression era gangsters and the police force struck a bargain. We will explore the impact of new deal programs like the civilian conservation corps as just to paladuro canyon outside amarillo, texas. We would not have this year if it was not for the occupation corps. And we will hear about artists who tell details. To begin our cities tour feature with a trip to toledo, ohio. In the 1920s, toledo was the fastestgrowing manufacturing city in america. In some ways it was like the Silicon Valley of today. The auto industry, cutting Edge Technologies were all centered here, as a result, the Manufacturing Base was going gang busters. Toledo seemed to be one of the brightest economic spots on the whole american map, during a decade, that was a decade of rosperity. Then in 1931, the entire house of cards collapsed in one week. Five of the six largest banks in toledo all failed at the same time. Which made it the largest banking failure of the Great Depression. The Banking Industry was perhaps more corrupt than other places, and that contributed to its catastrophic collapse. Toledo is the 27th largest city in america and its economy was diversified for a city of its size. It was an upandcoming major producer of automobiles. It had one of the largest Automobile Companies producing cars here. But it was also a city that had a large Manufacturing Base in the glass industry. In fact not only did it have probably the most Glass Production of any city in the country, its companies owned all the important patents to glass technologies. Any bottle and any window pane that was made in the world, some of those royalties came back to toledo. The Banking System in toledo is similar to the Banking System throughout ohio, maybe even the country. The banks were mostly chartered by the state government, not the federal government. Thats significant. That means the federal government did not regulate or inspect them, instead, the inspections and regulations were done by the state of ohio. That unfortunately allowed banks to pursue a wild west atmosphere of investing. They did not have many constraints on the type of roles they would give out. And they did not have constraints on any business decision they made. What happened was that the banks pretty much escaped even state regulation. We know this because, just on the eve of all these banks collapsing, the state inspectors certify them all as being healthy. In fact, the bank that is right next door was put on the auto role of ohio banks, even though it had not made a profit in over a year, and even though the inspectors discovered they were at least 300,000 short on their accounting and the Bank Directors had given themselves dividends, illegally. In spite of that, they put it on the honor roll of banking. Thats how weak banking regulations were here. We are in the former trust building, which was the only bank that survived that period. It survived because it was part of a Federal Reserve system and was federally inspected. Anks had to have good at accounting and was able to escape the regulations put upon it. When their bank crisis occurred, and other banks begun failing, they could call on the Federal Reserve in cleveland and have an armored truck truck filled with 11 million in cash, driven out here so fast that it got into an accident and had to transfer its entire stock into a different armored car to make the trip. It was putting the depositors at ease that they had money. The problem all of the banks in the city were owned by local investors, and controlled by local directors. The major problem that leads to the Bank Failures is that the directors and owners were also involved in other companies. They were often times the owners of Big Manufacturing Companies in town. Often times Bank Directors would be directors on two or three banks at the same time. Hey would also be involved all the Bank Directors were heavily invested in Real Estate Companies because one of the primary contributors to the bank crisis here in toledo in the 1930s, just as it was in america in 2007, was the overinvestment in real estate. Real estate speculation reached a mindboggling rate in the 1920s. For example, by 1925 there was 435 Real Estate Companies in this small city. They developed 67 subdivisions, which could hold over one Million People for a city of a uarter Million People. Clearly overleveraged and verinvested. Real Estate Companies could do this because they were owned by Real Estate Investors who were loaning money and giving themselves money. The interlocking directives of the Real Estate Companies and Manufacturing Companies meant here were all these incentives for bankers to give out loans when there was not collateral for a Good Business reason to do so. By 1931, that overhang of bad loans, finally the bill came do. Due. On june 6, 1931, rumors were swirling around the city that the banks were about to fail. Crowds of depositors lined up outside the doors to demand their money. Little did they know that when they lined up outside the doors the people inside the banks, the directors, owners, and investors were already removing their money ahead of the depositors leaving them very little. Toledo, after the bank crisis of 1931, went from being a city in recession to a city in catastrophe. By the winter of 1932, its estimated half of all the workers in toledo were laid off. Things got so bad that the city of toledo, which went bankrupt, couldnt afford to buy bulbs for streetlights. Every day the city got a little darker and darker. They cannot replace fire trucks. The number of fires increased every year. By 1934, one out of six people were on federal relief. Federal relief was so tight for toledo that dietitians begin calculating the minimum number of calories needed to maintain life. Thats what was allocated to individuals. It could not have been much worse from that sense. The city was very much closed by 1932 as a result of the bank crisis. Toledo was in a state of economic catastrophe through most of the Great Depression. It was not until 1936 that the programs of the new deal had an affect. By the late 1930s is a high proportion of the workforce was federally employed. It was federal new deal relief that got the city back on its feet. Of course, its also true throughout the country and the Great Depression, the coming of the war in the 1940s invigorating the economy. Toledo retooled for the war. They began making the famous wartime released jeep. A converted many of its hardware factories into munitions factories. By the early 1940s, toledo was running on full employment. The economy would never rebound the way it was in the 1920s. The 1920s, toledo was one of the Fastest Growing cities in the country. In the 1930s it actually lost population. After the war, and the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, their rate of growth fell behind the national average. They never recovered after the Great Depression. It is pretty much the signal event of the citys modern history. Two years after the banking rash, the crash, the nations Banking System itself is on the brink of collapse. Must have faith. To take care of all needs. The Banking System is not the only thing president roosevelt has his eyes on. Bill after bill. Whatever roosevelt wants, he gets. The house is burning down says the republican floor leader. Give the president anything he needs to put out the fire. Through 100 historic days of a special session, every new deal measured passes without uestion. The new secretary of the interior administered the p. W. A. Program of public works designed to create jobs for the unemployed. Those hired for p. W. A. Initiatives worked on large scale public works and infrastructure prockets such as bridges, roads and dams. One of the most notable is the hoover dam. Up next, our cspan cities tour feature on the Great Depression takes you to what was originally named the boulder dam until a. P. A 1947 act of Congress Changes the name to honor herbert hoover. The dam was started in 1931 in april. The contractors were given seven years to complete it and they actually got it done in five years. When the federal government decided to authorize hoover dam and fund it, it took literally six different Construction Companies to come together with their resources to have enough staff, machines, manpower to put this together. Youll see the signs around hoover dam it was built by Six Companies because that is how many it there were 25,000 men that worked on the dam. At its peak about 1934 there , were 5000 workers. That were here working the workers worked 24 7. They had two days off a year they could take. It was voluntary. You ask a lot of people, everybody gets christmas, at the other day was the fourth of july. Thats how proud they were of the structure. The primary purpose for building hoover dam was flood control. The Colorado River could flood and flood and trickle and flood it was to thick to drink and too thick to farm. Too thin to farm. To control the colorado because it was washing everything away. Hoover dam was built primarily forefront flood control, and water delivery. Under a contract signed with arizona, nevada and california, the water was divvied up for the last 688 miles of the Colorado River. That is our region here. They wanted to have a way to deliver the water. You cannot do it all at once, you have to do it when the farmers or communities need it. So water delivery was second, and hydropower, generating electricity, was the third reason. I believe we have come down about 500 feet. We are in one of the tunnels that was built inside the walls besides hoover dam. We are headed to the arizona side of the dam. The arizona side as part of hoover dam that contains nine generators. It is generating electricity. You can see when we get in there, some of them are generating and some are not. The generators are marked a1, a2. We are what is called a teaching plan, which means we dont generate electricity all of the time. We generate electricity when we get an order from the Electrical Company that they need more power. Our choque around here is, when you turn on your generator when you turn on your power in california california, you will , see these generators fire up because they want more power. We dont just generate power, we generate water. We will not generate any power unless there is a water delivery to go with it. That water is designed to fill the water orders, and it will be released to generate electricity when water orders come in. Hoover dam is 726 feet high. Thats 171 feet higher than the Washington Monument in washington, d. C. About 50 feet above the bedrock. It is going to feed the contractors who have water entitlements to the colorado. It is a gravity arch dam, which means it is 650 feet at the bottom and then it comes up to 45 feet at the top. Basically, its pushing down and against the walls of the canyon, so it is definitely going to be staying in place. The dam, when it was constructed, took 4. 3 million cubic yards of concrete. Thats enough to build a 16 foot wide highway from los angeles to new york. When they were building that, a lot of construction folks know that concrete takes time to cool. To conquer that problem and keep pouring and make the deadline, they built their own refrigeration plant down here, in the 1932 timeframe, and they ran pipes through the concrete refrigerant with refridgerated water to cool the blocks so they could keep pouring. As they poured, they cooled the concrete. It was quite an ingenious thing to build their own refrigeration plant at the bottom of the canyon. Theres a large body of treaties, court cases, agreements called the law of the river. Included in it is the compact that was signed in 1922, which divvied up the water into the upper Colorado River basin and the lower Colorado River basin. That is basically what hoover dam controlled. The water deliveries to arizona, california and nevada. When they divvied it up, they counted on recordkeeping from 1905. Those had been pretty wet years. They actually divvied up the water based on pretty wet years. The systems are variable. You can have great snowpack and get lots of water in the colorado, or go through what we are going through now. 16 years of drought with maybe one good year. The lake is dropped, and the river is what is called over allocated. When the river is called over allocated, it means the hydrology is not keeping up with the water delivery needs. In other words, we are not getting enough water into the system to meet the water delivery needs that are contracted with us. As of today, we have never failed to meet the contracted water deliveries to arizona, nevada and california. We dont anticipate that next year. But if we continue to see the lake drop, we might be in a condition called shortage. In future years. And under that compact, arizona and nevada would take less water, california having the senior water right in that agreement. When a contract happen in 1922, the census for nevada with 8000 people. Nobody envisioned a las vegas, or a reno or any industry that has risen since then. As time went on, as water became more available, the community sprung up, las vegas group. Group. Grew. It has become a huge community. People continue to move out here. They have managed their water. They knew how much they had. It was predictable how much they could take by contract. They managed to recycle their water. If you look at the fountains in downtown las vegas, thats not freshwater, thats reused. They take care of every drop, recycle it and put a lot back into lake mead. As they had the plans for hoover dam, it was clear this would be an and normas an enormous undertaking. And people would want to see it. They knew they needed to add art deco. We have marble floors. The wing statues made of copper that salutes the american spirit. They knew people would come, and they sure did. We sell 800,000 tickets a year for the tours. You do have to buy a tour ticket. We get about one Million People a year that visit hoover dam. It is such an incredible mixture of engineering and art deco creativity. I sometimes think to myself how did those straightline engineers, and that architect, how did they find a place to get along and make is so beautiful and functional . Boulder dam stands today. Walls, standing and controlling the floods, and bundling the Colorado River. Overe hoover dam is one of 34,000 construction progress. Providing jobs to a nation with a nearly 25 unemployment rate, the agency spends over 6 billion from 1933 to 1949 1939. Next, a pwa construction project gone wrong. Takesr cspan cities tour us to the Pacific Northwest. Partially funded by the public ministration, the tacoma narrows bridge is built over the puget sounds towards the end of the era. The area we are standing in now is in the southern section of puget sound, which is the Washington State and Pacific Northwest great inland water. When the Transcontinental Railroad came, there was talk about one day being able to stand puget sound. It was not an undertaking anybody was prepared to do. Its during the depression federal programs, like the building of the coulee dam, there were big projects happening in the Pacific Northwest. In the mid1930s there was talk about creating a bridge over puget sound. It would reach from tacoma to the kit sap peninsula. The, narrows rich was opened on the first of july in 1940. After two years of construction. The tacoma narrows is a bit of a wind tunnel. People working on the deck began to notice movement. Almost like airplane wing lifts in the bridge. Unlike horizontal movement, they began to feel a vertical lift in