PORTLAND, Ore.— In recent years, much has been made of the resurfacing of lost episodes from television shows, or songs from recording studios.

Now, a Federal bureaucracy is trumpeting a lost treasure of its own, and what it reveals is that long before there were spin doctors and image meisters, government agencies took a more direct approach to publicizing major initiatives.

Fifty years ago, the Bonneville Power Administration hired Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl balladeer, to sing the praises of public ownership of electric power. At the time, the wild Columbia river was being harnessed behind a series of dams; from those dams would come irrigation for desert land and one of the largest hydroelectric power systems in the world.

The power administration was set up to develop and market the near-limitless electricity from the dams. Private utilities, threatened by the cheaper public power, were waging a campaign to keep control of the areas they served. Throughout the Pacific Northwest, communities were voting to go one way or the other.

Enter Stephen B. Kahn, Bonneville's information director with an idea to make a movie about hydroelectric power on the Columbia that was to be used as a selling tool for public power.

As part of the project, Mr. Kahn put Guthrie on the payroll in 1941 for one month. His idea was to put Guthrie's songs on a soundtrack for the film.

In 1941, Guthrie was 28 years old, and had already written the song that would become his most famous, "This Land Is Your Land." He was having trouble holding a job. So when a friend of the singer mentioned that Guthrie could find temporary work in the Pacific Northwest, singing about public power, he jumped at the opportunity, coming north to Portland from Los Angeles.

Now 81 years old and living in Carmel, Calif., Mr. Kahn recalled that Guthrie threw himself into the project. "I had a little trouble getting him hired," he said, "but, in retrospect, I don't think the Government has ever gotten a better investment on its money."

In one month, for a salary of $266, Guthrie wrote 26 songs. They were ballads about migrants and poor farmers, lofty verses about the transforming power of water in arid land, and even some personal ditties.

Most of his songs, performed by Mr. Guthrie with his guitar and harmonica, were recorded on acetate disk at the Bonneville headquarters here. The film was delayed by World War II, but it eventually was finished in 1948, and used successfully in elections throughout the Northwest.

When a Republican Administrationtook office in 1953, all copies of the film and its songs were ordered destroyed, said Mr. Kahn. Guthrie was thought to be a Marxist, but even though he wrote for The Daily People's World, a San Francisco-based communist newspaper, the singer was never a member of any political party, according to Guthrie biographers.

In the mid-1980's, as Bonneville approached its 50th anniversary, an employee, Bill Murlin, began a research project to track down the lost songs. Over several years, he collected the lyrics to all 26 songs and original recordings of 17. Some were in people's closets. Others were in Federal archives. And others were recorded commercially by Guthrie.

Mr. Murlin said he thought the American public owned most of the songs, although some are copyrighted by the Guthrie estate. Sing-Out magazine plans to publish the entire Bonneville collection of lyrics this month.

One of the recordings found was of the best-known tune Guthrie wrote in 1941, "Roll On, Columbia," which contains the chorus: Roll on, Columbia, roll on, Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, So roll on, Columbia, roll on.

At the time, damming the Columbia was considered noble and humanitarian. As Guthrie wrote in another song: "Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of '33/ For the farmers and the workers and for all humanity."

"If our generation has anything good to offer history, it's that dam," Murray Morgan, a Northwest historian, wrote in his book, The Dam, about the building of the Grand Coulee dam.

In the half-century since Guthrie sang about the river, the image of the public power system here has been tarnished, in part, by an attempt to build nuclear power plants in the 1970's that resulted in the largest municipal bond default in history. But Guthrie's reputation has continued to grow.

"If we hired Woody today, we'd have him singing about saving salmon and conserving energy, instead of using him to sell power," said Mr. Murlin. "That is, if we could hire a folk singer for one month again."