Tingley book sprang from thesis

1935-1938” by Lucinda Lucero Sachs; Sunstone Press, 376 pp. ($26.95)

You can’t draw a straight line from the presentation of Lucinda Lucero Sachs’ master’s thesis on Clyde Tingley’s New Deal to her newly published book on the subject.

A straight line would be inaccurate. The line would have to zig and zag to fully explain the chronology of events that led to her book about an important, but little remembered piece of New Mexico history: the contributions Tingley made to the state while he was governor of New Mexico during the Great Depression.

In graduate school at the University of New Mexico, Sachs, a resident of Alameda, had written a paper on former U.S. Sen. Dennis Chavez for a seminar. History professors Ferenc Szasz, Richard Etulain and Gerald Nash, a New Deal scholar, liked it, she recalled.

They suggested Sachs write her master’s thesis on Tingley’s “little New Deal.” She did, but the thesis lay dormant, as many do.

The New Deal was the nickname given President Franklin Roosevelt’s massive federal spending programs that put millions of unemployed to work and helped pull the country out of the Depression.

After grad school, Sachs returned to public education, teaching United States history and civics at Albuquerque High School.

Meanwhile, she wrote the manuscript for a romance novel set in colonial New Mexico. She didn’t like it so she trashed it.

Then Sachs began writing a novel about New Mexico politics in the 1930s. She submitted it to Sunstone Press in Santa Fe, but it didn’t excite Sunstone’s Jim Smith.

“Jim suggested I write a history book based on my thesis on Clyde Tingley. I thought I’d finish it in six months, a year. No. It took two years,” Sachs said.

“The most important thing that I think this book says is that Tingley brought New Mexico into the 20th century with infrastructure, for example, the construction of dams, highways, bridges, courthouses. … He had the state build over 700 public schools.”

Sachs said every community provided construction materials for public projects and Tingley got the federal Works Progress Administration to pay for the cost of labor.

She said Tingley established the first state Bureau of Revenue to centralize the tax collections, he introduced a sales tax to support public schools … and got the state to institute pari-mutuel betting on horse races with some of the revenues going into the state treasury.

Tingley was a colorful public official. “He massacred the English language because it was fun and maybe because he was friends with (humorist) Will Rogers. He was good friends with (actor) Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who campaigned for him,” Sachs said.