Fear Itself (36 page)

The NRA’s congressional supporters took up the argument that the survival of democracy under conditions of economic emergency required just such action. “Under normal times this measure would be unthinkable; but these are not normal conditions or times,” Democratic senator David Walsh of Massachusetts proclaimed, for this is a moment of “economic war . . . that threatens the very destruction of our political institutions.”
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Even if it were plausible to label the NRA a “benign dictatorship,” North Carolina’s Edward Pou, the Democrat who chaired the House Rules Committee, argued, fears of dictatorship were misplaced because the bill, “dedicated to the welfare of the American people,” would protect the very existence and legitimacy of democratic life.
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Planning, in short, had been turned from a tool of the dictators into an instrument for democracy.

II.

A
S THE
Recovery Act quickly snaked its way through Congress, no one underestimated what was at stake for American democracy; New Jersey Republican congressman Charles Eaton designated it as the New Deal’s effort “to remake the entire structure” of American capitalism.
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“We all know that an emergency exists, that the economic structure has fallen,” the Kentucky Democrat Fred Vinson told the House. Later secretary of the treasury from July 1945 to June 1946, then chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1946 to 1953, Vinson strongly defended the legislation’s combination of planning, corporatism, and public works for its promise to “build anew upon the ruins.”
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All agreed, as Robert Doughton, its House sponsor, declared, that the proposed law was “something unusual, something extraordinary.”
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This massive statute moved through Congress in less than a month with the support of the vast majority of Pou’s, Vinson’s, and Doughton’s southern colleagues. It was Pou, a traditional segregationist serving in his thirty-fourth year in the House and one of the New Deal’s most stalwart supporters before his death, in April 1934, who led his Rules Committee to pass a closed rule prohibiting amendments, despite the objections of House Republicans and some Democrats. Each of the key committees that had jurisdiction over this legislation was led by an enthusiastic southern backer: Doughton, who chaired the Committee on Ways and Means, and Mississippi’s Pat Harrison, who chaired the Finance Committee in the Senate.

In all, southern legislators argued for and strongly advanced the bill in much the same terms as nonsouthern Democrats. Like their party colleagues, they underscored how the NIRA was moving through the lawmaking process with great popular support and widespread consent by business and labor. While ushering the law through the amendment process in the Senate, Harrison reported that “the representatives of labor who appeared before the committee know what is in the bill, and they have approved the bill. Representatives of the great industries of the country, and of the trade organizations, came before the committee and they approved the bill.”
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Doughton also noted how the bill “is favored or supported by industry, by agriculture, and by labor,” and thus how “those three powerful organizations in this country are all behind this legislation.” In attending to the bill’s technical features, especially its tax provisions and funding allocations, he underlined their benefits, especially how they met “the prime need of millions of our citizens today, a job.” This bill, he declared, “undertakes to make that a certainty.”
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The Senate voted on fifteen amendments. Of these, fourteen were defeated or passed by starkly partisan votes that were marked by nearly identical patterns of support by southern and nonsouthern Democrats. One amendment, introduced by Missouri’s Democratic senator Joel Bennett Clark, objected to the code-making process and the suspension of antitrust regulations for being insufficiently tough on business. This criticism from the Left deployed anticolonial and anti–big business rhetoric and analysis. Clark persuaded eight of the twenty-nine southern Democrats in the Senate at the time to join him to repeal Title I, the heart of the bill, because it would facilitate the concentration of industry.
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This was the one moment when a cohort of more conservative southern senators, who included Harry Byrd of Virginia and Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, worried about the growth of federal power, joined the future Supreme Court justice Hugo Black of Alabama and Tom Connally of Texas, who were concerned that the bill was too generous to business, to defect from the New Deal Democratic consensus.

The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 323–76 margin on May 26. In all, there had been just five roll calls in this chamber. Two were procedural, one concerned the allocation formula for highway funds, another was a motion to recommit, and, most important, there was a vote on final passage (approval of the conference report came by voice vote). With the exception of a sectional vote on how to allocate money to various regions for roads, the bill elicited strong partisan votes, marked by a remarkable degree of of Democratic Party unity.
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When the Senate passed the bill on June 9 by a 58–24 margin, with all but four Democrats voting in favor, there was a nearly comparable degree of high agreement between the southern and nonsouthern wings of the party.
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Like other Democrats, most southern members in the House and Senate agreed with Doughton that the New Deal had successfully charted “a middle course between the ruinous or complete monopoly in vogue prior to the enactment of the Sherman antitrust law and the era of unfair competition that now has a strangle hold upon business. It sets up flexible machinery which the President may use to prevent monopoly on the one hand and ruinous competition on the other.”
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Despite the similarities in talk and voting across the Democratic Party, distinctly southern voices could be heard expressing a concern for maintaining antitrust measures and the wish to control business. These positions were articulated most strongly by the tenacious and progressive Senator Black. Having closely studied the issue of unemployment, including the potential effects of a shorter workweek, he had proposed a thirty-hour cap in the interest of spreading existing jobs across a larger sector of the populace. His bill passed the Senate on April 6, 1933, but it did not advance in the House, in part because Roosevelt ordered his policy planners to design a recovery act with a more flexible provision for maximum hours. Rebuffed, Black did not support the new bill, despite the administration’s offer that he should become its principal Senate sponsor.
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In contrast to FDR, he had come from hardscrabble roots in an impoverished family from the Appalachian foothills. He was especially concerned that the law would enhance rather than control business power, and that less economically developed southern states, like his own Alabama, which possessed weak industrial structures and a welter of endemic poverty, would find themselves at the mercy of code makers from richer states.
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He was keen to place more robust controls on industry profits in order to place more money in the hands of workers and consumers, and he was especially exercised that the bill suspended antitrust legislation. During final passage, though, he cast an affirmative vote despite reservations caused by the removal of an amendment added by the Senate. This amendment, sponsored by William Borah, the progressive Idaho Republican, banned price fixing by NRA codes. When this stipulation was stripped from the bill in conference, Black, as well as eleven other senators, including four other southern members,
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switched their votes, thus narrowing passage to a 46–39 margin.
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On these matters, Black found himself in a minority in his region. He and his colleagues were united and successful, however, in their insistence that the NRA must not undermine the South’s racial system. The heart of that matter was the status of agricultural and domestic labor.

During the floor debate in both chambers, southern legislators voiced apprehension that the provisions of the act might extend to agricultural labor. Senators Huey Long of Louisiana and Joel Clark of Missouri complained that the law failed to define “industry,” the category of activity it regulated, and thus expressed concern that the term might apply to agriculture.
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Long stated that the bill as written applied to “every laboring man.”
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Concerned about southern votes, the law’s principal congressional author, Robert Wagner of New York, responded by confirming that “in the act itself agriculture is specifically excluded.”
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Though the legislation contained no language declaring this exclusion, this claim did prove accurate. As it turned out, the NRA itself interpreted “industry” to exclude farming, and it explicitly announced that “Congress did not intend that codes of fair competition . . . be set up for farmers or persons engaged in agricultural production.” No NRA codes were ever established for domestics or farmworkers, thus excluding the vast majority of southern blacks from their minimum wage and maximum hours benefits. Further, the definition of agriculture was extended to include industries related to it, such as canning, many of which were low-paid and had many black employees. The law explicitly delegated to the president the ability to pass his authority, in turn, to the secretary of agriculture, who could decide whether the scope of coverage took in these industries.

In a series of executive orders, Roosevelt took this course. As a result, such industries as citrus packing and cotton ginning remained outside the range of the NRA’s industrial codes, leaving their workers unprotected. Within industries that were covered under the law, the NRA permitted codes to recognize regional wage differentials, with lower minimum wages authorized for southern workers. “It is not the purpose of the Administration,” the president explained in April 1934 in a statement about the coal industry, “by sudden or explosive change, to impair southern industry by refusing to recognized traditional differentials.” What gained an industry a classification as southern, moreover, was an employment pattern in which the majority of workers in a given state simply were African-American. This practice distinguished protected jobs performed by whites, who earned higher wages and worked fewer hours, from unprotected jobs performed by blacks. As an example, fertilizer production in Delaware, where nine out of ten workers were black, was assigned a southern code, while workplaces in that state were coded as northern when their workers were overwhelmingly white.
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Although the NRA never recognized any racial basis for differentiating among workers, these occupational decisions effectively reinforced southern practices and reassured the region’s politicians.

III.

T
HE IMMENSE
turnout and the passion of the participants and spectators at the September NRA march, Governor Lehman argued, offered “proof that the NRA is going over.” Maj. Gen. Dennis Nolan, the parade’s organizer, remarked how “the entire spirit of the people has changed.”
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At a mass rally held the night before the parade at Madison Square Garden, General Johnson proclaimed that “the four years as grievous as ever plagued a people had begun to come to a close.”
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During the next four months, a distinguished group of political leaders and policy intellectuals positively appraised the recovery program at a series of lectures held at Swarthmore College. John Dickinson, an assistant secretary of commerce, spoke of how “all groups and classes have been stirred to a recognition of the common national interest.” Rexford Tugwell discussed how the NRA would lead to encouraging “long-term national policies.” A. Heath Onthank, a senior official in the NRA, pointed with pride to how “every single person connected with the National Recovery Administration realizes he is in a fight for the future of America.” Herbert Tily, the president of the National Retail Council and the man who led Strawbridge and Clothier, an East Coast department store chain, lauded the NRA’s “attempt to give business and industry a mandate to control itself.” And Leo Wolman, who chaired the NRA’s Labor Advisory Board, talked glowingly of how the law had “effected unprecedented improvements in both prevailing rates of wages and in the length of the work week.”
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Looking back, most historians and social scientists have judged differently. The NRA failed, nearly all agree, well before the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in a May 1935 landmark decision,
A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States,
that the law’s delegation of power to the president and the executive branch violated the Constitution.
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A 1937 study by Charles Roos, an economist who had been one of the research directors for the NRA, set the tone by arguing that inadequate personnel, insufficient statistics, and clumsy economic interventions had limited its effectiveness. “Despite laudable reform efforts to abolish child labor, to eliminate intolerable unfair trade practices, to make competition function more smoothly through open prices, and, most important, to promote discussion of economic issues,” he concluded, “the NRA must, as a whole, be regarded as a sincere but ineffective effort to alleviate depression.”
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This judgment has stuck. Ellis Hawley’s influential study recorded “administrative mistakes, the attempt to do too much all at once, the failure to get the public works program going when it was most needed . . . mistaken assumptions about the altruism of businessmen” and “other errors of commission and omission.”
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The Blue Eagle, David Kennedy assessed, was less a “badge of honor” than a signal of “the poverty of the New Deal’s imagination and the meagerness of the methods it could bring to bear at this time against the Depression.” It was, he further concluded, “dead on arrival as recovery measure.”
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In all, Jonathan Alter’s study of the Hundred Days concluded that “in retrospect, the NRA was a big, splashy, bad idea.”
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