American Experiment (292 page)

With Johnson as bugler, the NRA galvanized the American people like a national call to arms. Suddenly the Blue Eagle was everywhere—on magazine covers, in the movies, on girls in chorus lines. (But not on Ford cars; Henry Ford perversely refused to sign the automobile code, then lived up to it anyway.) Rushing from city to city in an army plane, dishing out Boy Scout-style enthusiasm, biting criticism, and wisecracks at every stop, Johnson pressured and coaxed businessmen to endorse the codes, then gathered them in Washington for the signing and orating. As the very personification of recovery, the general staged a monster Blue Eagle parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue. For hours he reviewed the parade of a quarter million persons, with another million and a half cheering from the sidewalks. Not since 1917 had Americans savored such a throbbing sense of marching unity.

As the months passed, though, the questions became more and more urgent: Unity for what? Marching to where? Under pressure for quick
results, Johnson dealt with the business and labor leaders closest at hand, those who were most vocal, best organized, most skillful in dealing with bureaucrats and politicians. Inevitably he delegated crucial pricing and production decisions to the dominant interests, which often turned out to be the biggest corporations. The NRA was becoming a breeder of monopoly, charged Senator Gerald Nye. Who would speak for unorganized consumers? A Consumers’ Advisory Board was set up but without adequate political muscle; its members, Tugwell said, were “spearheads without shafts.”

Union labor, being organized, fared better under NRA. Section 7(a) of the act boldly proclaimed that employees “shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers” in choosing their representatives. No one seeking or holding a job “shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing.” Union leaders greeted this as labor’s Magna Carta—comparable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, said John L. Lewis—and the message was clear: Organize, “
THE PRESIDENT WANTS YOU TO JOIN A UNION,”
placards read. “Forget about injunctions, yellow dog contracts, black lists and the fear of dismissal.” But there were complications. President William Green and the American Federation of Labor old guard wanted to organize workers into separate craft unions, even in huge auto plants, while Lewis and the rising young militants around him wanted to organize all the workers in a plant or company or industry into big, solid industrial unions.

Employers bridled at 7(a). Many set up company unions—or “employee representation plans”—which came to be run by company stooges. Labor responded with a rash of strikes during the summer of 1933; by September nearly 300,000 workers had walked out. The “concert of interests” seemed to
be
emitting discordant noises. “N.R.A. means National Run Around,” read a sign hoisted on a picket line. The President set up special boards, trimmed NRA’s power, eased Johnson out, and put in more domesticated chiefs, but to little avail; during 1934 the NRA eagle fluttered through heavy weather.

In the end the significance of the National Recovery Administration was not its impact on economic recovery, which was mixed, but its curbing of child labor, sweatshops, and unfair trade practices, its big boost to unionization and its modest protection to consumers. Why then was the NRA finally dismissed as a failure, even privately by Roosevelt himself? Largely because it failed in its highly touted supreme aim of bringing capital, labor,
and other interests into a happy concert under the “Broker State,” and by artificially raising prices and restricting production, it only marginally helped produce recovery.

If the Concert of Interests did not work, what would? Public works, the companion piece to the NRA, was launched with little of the drama of the Blue Eagle, under the leadership of one of the most committed and stouthearted New Dealers, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Touchy and cantankerous, suspicious of friend and foe—and especially of government contractors—“Honest Harold” did not hesitate to use government snoopers to check on suspect PWA employees and their financial connections. Ickes was in no great hurry; his big projects needed careful planning and budgeting as well as laborious scrutiny by the secretary himself When the public works program finally got underway it built gas and electric power plants, jails and hospitals, sewage and water systems, bridges, docks, and tunnels—and aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, army and navy airplanes. But the $9 billion that PWA ultimately spent were not central to recovery during Roosevelt’s first two years.

Much quicker to get underway was the federal relief program under a lanky young ex-director of private welfare programs named Harry Hopkins, who acted almost as fast as he talked. Appointed Federal Emergency Relief Administrator with a grant of half a billion dollars, Hopkins began authorizing millions of dollars in relief even while he was wailing in a hallway to be moved into his office. Since he could give money only to the state and local public relief agencies, which in turn administered relief programs, he could do little more than monitor the levels of compassion and competence with which programs were carried out. Behind his cynical, wisecracking façade Hopkins was deeply concerned with guarding the dignity, pride, and self-esteem of people on relief. Hence he was eager that the unemployed be given jobs and not merely handouts, but job programs cost more money. Late in 1933 Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to launch a massive crash program to employ 4 million. In its brief existence, the Civil Works Administration undertook the building or rebuilding of vast numbers of roads, parks, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and other “light,” short-term projects, in contrast to the PWA’s “heavy” jobs.

It was this massive spending on work relief, supplemented by that of the PWA, the TVA, the CCC, the AAA, and other programs, that in 1933 and 1934 provided the central thrust of the early New Deal. It was not really planned that way; Roosevelt was responding not to grand ideology or to grand economics but to sheer human needs that he recognized and that Eleanor Roosevelt, Hopkins, Perkins, and the others brought to him. This was part of Roosevelt’s political strength in the face of the bewildering
problems of 1933 and 1934: the ability to follow ad hoc, expedient policies; to mediate between liberals and moderates, ideologues and politicians, spenders and economizers; to move so quickly and deftly from policy to policy, posture to posture, as to keep his adversaries guessing and off balance; and hence to avoid being cornered by left or right—all the while helping millions of people in need.

Was this oscillating middle way also the President’s weakness? Instead of standing above the contending groups in society his administration often became part of the struggle, even sundered by it. By trying to do so many different—even competing—things, he did few that were adequate to the desperate needs. In trying to be both budget-balancer and provider, he satisfied neither the economizers nor those who believed that only a truly massive spending program would produce a massive recovery. By flirting with groups and movements stretched across the political spectrum he lost an opportunity to mobilize and lead forces arrayed from a “little left of center” to the far left. Perhaps the basic problem was one of intellectual grasp. “Roosevelt had a cogent overall interpretation of presidential leadership,” in James Sargent’s judgment, but the “disorder and ambiguity of his thought and expression” intruded when he “attempted to transfer his general thinking to specific proposals and actions.” Thus, in December 1933 the President told a press conference that “somewhere” between Douglas’s efforts to economize and “those who want to spend ten billion additional on public works, we will get somewhere.…”

In foreign policy, where Presidents usually have a freer hand, Roosevelt was equally vigorous, versatile, volatile—and opportunistic. At heart still an old Wilsonian, he had made enough concessions to Hearst and other nationalists to leave himself in an ambivalent position from the start of his administration. In choosing Cordell Hull for Secretary of State he was recognizing a man who had made no secret of his hope to crown his lifework for expanded trade and economic cooperation among nations. But in his domestic policies, with the backing of Moley, Tugwell, and others, the President was seeking a moderate rise in farm and industrial prices, which he did not want washed out by an inundation of cheap goods from abroad. Moreover, he had inherited a dubious bequest from Hoover: to take part in an International Monetary and Economic Conference set for London in the early summer, which might conflict with his early decision to go off the gold standard and his plan to free his monetary policy— especially his moderate “reflation” efforts—from entanglement with the international gold standard.

Roosevelt’s approach to the London Conference reflected his crossed purposes and mixed counsel in foreign affairs. Despite his skepticism about
the London gathering, he threw himself into the posture of world leader by receiving foreign representatives, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, at the White House in April. Rosy pieties at these meetings raised hopes for the conference. Then the President sent to London a delegation headed by Hull but including also such protectionists as Senator Key Pittman of Nevada; the President had even tried to enlist the Senate’s supreme isolationist, Hiram Johnson, who shrewdly declined. In London the American delegation wandered in a fog of confusion which was only intensified by Roosevelt’s belated dispatch of Moley as “liaison” and ultimately, apparently, as possible fall guy. Suddenly there arrived a sharp message from Roosevelt in effect scolding the delegates for trifling with efforts for an artificial and temporary monetary stability and for ignoring fundamental ills. Confounded, the conference limped on for a few weeks and then quit, amid sharp recriminations and general hopelessness.

Roosevelt’s torpedoing of the conference did not usher in wholly nationalist policies, however; he preferred to keep dual strategies in play. In the fall he set up a committee of low-tariff men to prepare a bill for the 1934 session of Congress. On their recommendation Roosevelt asked Congress for presidential authority to make commercial agreements with foreign nations under which rates could be revised 50 percent either way. The passage of this bill was a triumph for Hull’s internationalism.

But what about Roosevelt’s? In the fall of 1933 he was still pursuing the nationalist economic policies for which his London Conference “bombshell message” had freed him. One of these policies was to shore up domestic prices by buying gold—a device that had been sold the President by a monetary theorist. So for some weeks there occurred a most extraordinary episode in presidential history—the President of the United States meeting every morning with his new Acting Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to set the price of gold. Since edging prices upward rather than any precise figure was the aim, Roosevelt could rather arbitrarily set the figure within a certain range. Once when he proposed to Morgenthau an increase to twenty-one cents, he twitted the solemn secretary by explaining, “It’s a lucky number, because it’s three times seven.”

Also in the fall, however, Roosevelt brought off what in history might rank as potentially the most significantly internationalist act of all—recognition of the Soviet Union. This action followed lengthy haggling over terms, Washington holding out hopes for expanded trade and Moscow making vague promises to stop abetting revolutionary activity in the United States and to protect the right of free religious worship of Americans in Russia. Eleanor Roosevelt liked to tell of visiting a schoolroom where the Soviet Union had been blacked out—actually “whited out”—on
a map of the world, leaving only a void. Roosevelt now had begun to fill that void.

To some inside the Roosevelt administration the New Deal by summer 1934 appeared in disarray, if not chaos. “Public works” was almost at a full stop, Berle observed, and NRA rapidly disintegrating. “We have an administration in very bad shape indeed.” Key officials, especially on the right, were quitting the administration. Lewis Douglas left in August and Acheson was preparing to leave. Some projects failed or badly faltered: the gold purchase venture; an effort by Ickes to impose some order in the chaotic oil industry; an effort by the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to provide food for the needy and to stabilize the commodity markets. The last two of these fell afoul of industry pressures and fragmentation. The President’s abrupt cancellation of private carriers’ airmail contracts on the grounds of collusion and the assumption by the Air Corps of the flying of the mails led to a series of plane crashes and pilot deaths in the February 1934 storms—a much-publicized disaster that might have brought down a less popular President.

The public as a whole had quite a different view of the administration. It saw a President who was doing his damnedest, quick to confront specific problems, brilliant at explaining his deeds and hopes, always positive, exuberant, seemingly on top of things. The public saw a leader.

For that public the ultimate test was economic recovery, and the flush of prosperity felt strong by fall 1934, compared to the miseries of March 1933. Could “bucks” be converted to ballots? A third of the senators and all the representatives were up for reelection. Roosevelt’s tactic was to stand above the party battle, in line with his bipartisan posture of “leader of all the people.” But he helped friendly candidates indirectly, and he posed the campaign issue by asking in a fireside chat, “Are you better off than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure? Are your working conditions better? Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?”

The result was a resounding verdict for the President and his New Deal. Typically Presidents lost ground in midterm congressional elections, but in 1934 Democratic strength rose from 313 to 322 in the House and— incredibly—from 59 to 69 in the Senate. A clutch of highly conservative Republican senators was sacked. “Some of our friends think the majority top-heavy,” Garner wrote the President, “but if properly handled, the House and Senate will be all right and I am sure you can arrange that.”