Jonathan Storm: In PBS series on the 1930s, perspectives on hard times

When times are tough, ingenuity's importance increases, as PBS's

American Experience

demonstrates both on the screen and in its operations, conserving resources as it stays relevant with a new, five-part series about the '30s.

The series is new. Four of the five one-hour movies aren't, but they have been "collected," the Experience folks say, to illuminate, capably and entertainingly, the last time the economy hit the skids as badly as it has recently.

In the Depression of the '30s, of course, it just kept on skidding.

The 1930s, premiering tomorrow and running five consecutive Mondays at 9 p.m. on WHYY TV12, is fascinating in the way it draws parallels to these tough times, both the causes and the potential solutions. Each film stands alone, so, unlike some recent TV documentaries, the series does not demand that you have the heart of a marathoner.

Repurposed films from earlier American Experience seasons are "The Crash of 1929" (made in 1990), airing tomorrow; "Hoover Dam" (1999), airing Nov. 9; "Surviving the Dust Bowl" (1998), airing Nov. 16, and "Seabiscuit" (2003), airing Nov. 23.

The new one, "The Civilian Conservation Corps," premiering Nov. 2, outlines one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's quickest and boldest moves to deal with unemployment that was officially pegged at 25 percent. Some things don't change. The "official" figure was considerably lower than the actual percentage.

Three months after the bill was signed, 250,000 unemployed, mostly young, men had been mobilized to camps in every state, as the federal government undertook the feeding, clothing and sheltering of a crowd that was nearly twice as big as the regular army. Eventually, 3 million men would find work maintaining and upgrading environmental conditions around the country.

It was a masterstroke, combining job creation and environmental protection, an idea that was close to Roosevelt's heart but not exactly on America's front burner, as "Surviving the Dust Bowl" so masterfully demonstrates.

Opposition to the CCC was strong. Vincent Ximenes of Floresville, Tex., one of the many folksy folks in all these films who experienced the '30s firsthand, says that plenty of people weren't convinced the Depression could be ameliorated by "planting umpteen million trees."

It is nice again to see renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who died three years ago, explaining in "The Crash of 1929" - years before the dot.com bubble and the stock market run-up in 2006 and '07 - that the exuberance of the 1920s may have been a little wild, but was par for the course in the American economy. The documentaries, however, are blessedly long on people like Ximenes, with experience, and short on authors and academics.

When he heard the government was going to build the world's biggest dam on the Arizona-Nevada border, says W.A. Davis, "I went to a car lot and bought a 1926 Essex car for $75 and took off for Las Vegas."

J.R. Davison of Texhoma, Okla., describes how he and his father worked round-the-clock with those newfangled tractors, digging up virgin soil in the late '20s to plant wheat. "They got the whole country plowed up, nearly."

It's almost hilarious hearing the lockjawed children of Charles Mitchell, powerful president of the institutional ancestor of Citibank. Craig Mitchell describes how his father so intimidated New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in a meeting that Walker pulled all the tacks out of one of the Mitchells' Louis Quatorze chairs.

"It was Louis Quinze," his sister reminds him.

"Crash" describes how big-time financiers manipulated markets, making millions, while small investors got hosed.

"Conservation Corps" notes how the president's efforts to fix things were hardly universally embraced. Cries were raised about deficit spending, and Roosevelt was accused of being a communist and a fascist, and you don't need to be a professional pundit to see political parallels to the present. But enough Congress members had enough suffering constituents, and the CCC was such a tangible program - instant employment - that it went through.

Men earned $1 a day, and were required to send $25 home to their families. Even in those days, that wasn't much of a wage, and the unions weren't happy, but Roosevelt co-opted them by putting machinists' union vice president Robert Fechner in charge of the whole operation, which was managed by the Army.

All five films are loaded with archival footage - enthusiastic Corpsmen heading off on trains, politicians in suits careening down the Colorado River, little homes buffeted by huge dust storms, Seabiscuit and jockey Red Pollard.

There's plenty of hard work and suffering on the screen, as the newly formulated series provides the kind of historical illumination that should be required viewing for anybody who claims to be knowledgeable about today's economy.

But for the audience, no heavy lifting at all. Important insight and information goes down as pleasantly as, or maybe more so than, an episode of NCIS or House.