Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed General Hugh
S. Johnson, as the person to administer the National
Recovery Administration (NRA). This involved organizing thousands
of businesses under fair trade codes drawn up by trade associations
and industries.
While these negotiations took place, Congress passed legislation that
set a 40 hour week for clerical workers, a 36 hour week for industrial
workers, a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour, abolished child
labour and a guaranteed the right that trade
unions could organize and exercise the right of collective bargaining.
The NRA program was voluntary. However, those businessmen who accepted
the codes developed by the various trade associations, could place
the NRA blue eagle symbol in their windows and on the packaging of
their goods. This virtually made the scheme compulsory as those companies
that did not display the NRA symbol were seen as unpatriotic and selfish.
About 23,000,000 people worked under the NRA fair code. However, violations
of codes became common. and attempts were made to use the courts to
enforce the NRA. In 1935 the Supreme Court
declared the NRA as unconstitutional. The reasons given were that
many codes were an illegal delegation of legislative authority and
the federal government had invaded fields reserved to the individual
states.
Restaurant supporting the NRA scheme.
(1)
Harold
Ickes, The Autobiography
of a Curmudgeon (1943)
Most
of us will remember how boldly he (Franklin D. Roosevelt) attacked
the most desperate
problem that ever faced a Chief Executive, not excepting the one that
had confronted Abraham Lincoln nearly seventy-five years before.
The "business administrations"
that had been going on in Washington under three Presidents had ruined
virtually everybody in the country (as well as their own reputations).
Spurred by an existing
national emergency, a panicky Congress lost no time in passing, among
other pieces of remedial legislation, the National Industrial Recovery
Act, hereinafter referred to as the NIRA. Congress, it seemed, could
move faster in those days than it did subsequently, when it developed
a slow, painstaking, and supercritical streak, which it continued
to maintain even when the Nazi dogs were ready to spring at our throats.
But in 1933 Congress quickly turned into
flour the grist that came to it in the form of the NIRA.
First off, it appropriated
the then staggering sum of $3,300,000,000 to be spent on permanent
public works, and it gave the Administrator, to be appointed by the
President, the right to set up a Public Works Administration. The
President honored me with that appointment.
(2)
John
T. Flynn,
The Roosevelt Myth (1944)
First, and most important,
was the NRA and its dynamic ringmaster, General Hugh Johnson. As I
write, of course, Mussolini is an evil memory. But in 1933 he was
a towering figure who was supposed to have discovered something worth
study and imitation by all world artificers everywhere. Such eminent
persons as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler and Mr. Sol Bloom, head of the
Foreign Affairs Committee of the House, assured us he was a great
man and had something we might well look into for imitation. What
they liked particularly was his corporative system. He organized each
trade or industrial group or professional group into a state supervised
trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives
operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality,
prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that
in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised
trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called
a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code
authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices,
distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This
was fascism. The antitrust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt
had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now
he suspended them and compelled men to combine.
At its head Roosevelt appointed
General Hugh Johnson, a retired Army officer. Johnson, a product of
the southwest, was a brilliant, kindly, but explosive and dynamic
genius, with a love for writing and a flair for epigram and invective.
He was a rough and tumble fighter with an amazing arsenal of profane
expletives. He was a lawyer as well as a soldier and had had some
business experience with Bernard Baruch. And he was prepared to produce
a plan to recreate the farms or the factories or the country or the
whole world at the drop of a hat. He went to work with superhuman
energy and an almost maniacal zeal to set this new machine going.
He summoned the representatives of all the trades to the capital.
They came in droves, filling hotels and public buildings and speakeasies.
Johnson stalked up and down the corridors of the Commerce Building
like a commanderinchief in the midst of a war.
He began with a blanket
code which every business man was summoned to sign to pay minimum
wages and observe the maximum hours of work, to abolish child labor,
abjure price increases and put people to work. Every instrument of
human exhortation opened fire on business to comply the press,
pulpit, radio, movies. Bands played, men paraded, trucks toured the
streets blaring the message through megaphones. Johnson hatched out
an amazing bird called the Blue Eagle. Every business concern that
signed up got a Blue Eagle, which was the badge of compliance. The
President went on the air: "In war in the gloom of night attack,"
he crooned, "soldiers wear a bright badge to be sure that comrades
do not fire on comrades. Those who cooperate in this program must
know each other at a glance. That bright badge is the Blue Eagle."
"May Almighty God have mercy," cried Johnson, "on anyone
who attempts to trifle with that bird." Donald Richberg thanked
God that the people understood that the long awaited revolution was
here. The New Dealers sang: "Out of the woods by Christmas!"
By August, 35,000 Clevelanders paraded to celebrate the end of the
depression. In September a tremendous host paraded in New York City
past General Johnson, Mayor O'Brien and Grover Whalen 250,000
in a line which did not end until midnight.
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