The Republicans keep saying the government can’t create jobs. That’s baloney.

Tens of thousands of unemployed Americans were glad to find work under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal programs of the 1930s. Their labor benefited the whole country, too.

They earned paychecks from Uncle Sam for constructing or improving streets, roads, highways, airports, courthouses, city halls, schools, post offices, libraries, fire stations, baseball and football stadiums, jails, state armories, band shells and parks. They planted trees, fought soil erosion and brought electricity to even the remotest farms.

They wrote history books and travel guides. They painted murals in public buildings, put on plays and concerts and taught people to read.

They were proud of their work, much of which survives, including the Works Progress Administration-built McCracken County courthouse in Paducah, Ky., where I teach history at the local community and technical college. (My grandfather and uncle were part of WPA crews that cleaned up Paducah after the Great Ohio River flood of 1937.)

Right-wing Republicans of old said FDR was a “socialist” because he believed government had an obligation to help people who needed help. Sound familiar? The GOP’s Roosevelt haters said the good times wouldn’t roll again until the government got out of the way and ”freed” the “free enterprise system.” Republicans are still crooning that tune.

Well, the free enterprise system was almost completely unfettered in the 1920s. The Republicans controlled the White House and Congress.

The rich controlled the GOP. The plutocrats—FDR called them “economic royalists”— bankrolled Republican lawmakers. They cheerfully kept down taxes and regulations on business and industry and had no problem with union busting employers whose workers labored long hours at low pay in jobs that sometimes threatened lives and limbs.

The twenties were “the Roaring Twenties.” The term implied that everybody was making good money and having a good time.

Reality was starkly different. Writes historian William E. Leuchtenburg in The Perils of Prosperity. 1914-1932:

Corporate profits and dividends far outpaced the rise in wages, and despite the high productivity of the period, there was a disturbing amount of unemployment. At any given moment in the ’golden twenties,’ from 7 to 12 percent were jobless.

In 1929, 71 percent of American families had incomes under $2,500, generally thought to be the minimum standard for a decent living. The 36,000 wealthiest families received as much income as the 12,000,000 families– 42 percent of all those in    America – ho received under $1,500 a year, below the poverty line.”

Sound familiar?

The Depression hit because most workers couldn’t afford to buy what business and industry was selling and producing.

President George W. Bush and his soul mates preached and practiced the same gospel of greed and bequeathed us the current recession, the hardest times since the Depression.

And Republican presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich and the rest of the pack of GOP president hopefuls are pushing the same old “trickle down” line.

“It’s more like ‘trickle on,” says Jeff Wiggins, a Steelworker and president of the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council.

I remember Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America.’ It was really his ‘Contract on America.’