Authors: Ira Katznelson
65
Ibid., 5243.
66
Ibid., 5241.
67
This discussion, including the Roosevelt citation, draws on the excellent overview by Marc Linder, “Farm Workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act: Racial Discrimination in the New Deal,”
Texas Law Review
65 (1987): 1354–61.
68
New York Times,
September 14, 1933.
69
Ibid., September 13, 1933.
70
Clair Wilcox, Herbert F. Fraser, and Patrick Murphy Malin, eds.,
America’s Recovery Program
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 42, 65, 85, 196, 180, 102.
71
A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States,
295 U.S. 495 (1935).
72
Charles Frederic Roos,
NRA Economic Planning
(Colorado Springs: Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, 1937), p. 472.
73
Hawley,
The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly,
p. 135.
74
David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 184, 179. For Alonzo Hamby, the NRA was “a definable culprit” whose “unrealistic expectations about its capacities, built-in contradictions among the interests it attempted to harmonize, and its fundamental unsuitability to an American environment” made it “fall short as an instrument of economic rescue.” According to the economic journalist Amity Shlaes, the NRA made a terrible situation worse by mistaking challenges facing the economy as a whole for challenges specific to individual sectors and firms. A leading social science appraisal by Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol likewise argues that “the National Recovery Administration did not contribute to recovery and probably actually hindered it.” See Hamby,
For the Survival of Democracy,
p. 165; Amity Shlaes,
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 150–52; Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol,
State and Party in America’s New Deal
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 10, 12. These various citations hardly exhaust the negative literature on the NRA. One of the more measured considerations in this vein is George McJimsey,
The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 55–84.
75
Jonathan Alter,
The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 303. There has been a loud drumbeat of retrospective criticism.
76
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2
(Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, 1976), pp. 226–27, 135. For a contemporaneous assessment, see Arthur Robert Burns, “The First Phase of the National Recovery Act, 1933,”
Political Science Quarterly
49 (1934): 161–94. A retrospective assessment commissioned by President Roosevelt in March 1936 found that the NRA’s policies to spread work, increase purchasing power, limit ruthless and anarchic competition, control child labor, and advance the capacities of organized labor had in fact made positive contributions both to recovery in the short term and to a secure and evenhanded capitalism in the long term. See House,
The National Recovery Administration: Report of the President’s Committee of Industrial Analysis,
75th Cong., 1st sess., 1937, H. Doc. 138, pp. 1–240. Even more independent and skeptical economists highlighted the NRA’s positive effects, even though it was difficult to disentangle its role from other factors. See Leonard Kurvin, “Effect of N.R.A. on the Physical Volume of Production,”
Journal of the American Statistical Association
31 (1936): 58–60.
77
Brand,
Corporatism and the Rule of Law,
pp. 229–89; for a more negative assessment, see Bernard Bellush,
The Failure of the NRA
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), a book that primarily focuses on labor and whose unremitting critique is ultimately less convincing than Brand’s deeper and more measured assessment.
78
Basil Rauch,
A History of the New Deal: 1933–39
(New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), p. 97.
79
Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt,
The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: United States Business and Public Policy in the 20th Century
(New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 107.
80
Wall Street Journal,
June 21, 1933.
81
Cited in Alan Brinkley,
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 162.
82
Gerard Swope, “Planning and Economic Organization,”
Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science
15 (1934): 455.
83
John Dickinson, “The Recovery Program,” in
America’s Recovery Program,
ed. Wilcox, Fraser, and Malin, p. 32. This chapter was based on the William J. Cooper Foundation Lecture he presented at Swarthmore College on October 22, 1933.
84
René de Visme Williamson,
The Politics of Planning in the Oil Industry under the Code
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 81.
85
A thoughtful overview can be found in Donald R. Brand, “Corporatism, the NRA, and the Oil Industry,”
Political Science Quarterly
98 (1983): 99–118; a revised version can be found in Brand,
Corporatism and the Rule of Law,
pp. 175–206.
86
Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,”
Political Science Quarterly
97 (1982): 255–256. For an assessment that contrasts the NRA with prior economic policies after World War I, see Robert F. Himmelberg,
The Origins of the National Recovery Administration: Business, Government, and the Trade Association Issue, 1921–1933
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1976).
87
Brand,
Corporatism and the Rule of Law
, p. 288.
88
Alan Brinkley,
The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 38.
89
Rexford G. Tugwell,
In Search of Roosevelt
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 299.
90
Brinkley,
The End of Reform,
pp. 40, 39.
91
For an argument along these lines, see Anne-Marie Burley, “Regulating the World: Multilateralism, International Law, and the Projection of the New Deal Regulatory State,” in
Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form,
ed. John Gerard Ruggie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
92
James T. Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 37.
93
Arthur Schlesinger Sr.,
The New Deal in Action, 1933–1937: A Continuation of A. M. Schlesinger’s Political and Social Growth of the United States to the Special Session of the United States Congress, November 15, 1937
(New York: Macmillan, 1938).
94
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt,
vol. 3,
The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 385.
95
Rauch,
A History of the New Deal.
It was in his evaluation of the relative conservatism and assertiveness of the two moments that Schlesinger took note of how Rauch’s “conception . . . differs from the one presented here” (p. 690). For a discussion of Rauch and the broader character of New Deal periodization, see Otis L. Graham Jr., “Historians and the New Deal, 1944–1960,”
Social Studies
54 (1963): 133–40.
96
Schlesinger Jr.,
The Politics of Upheaval,
p. 397.
97
Ibid., p. 385.
98
Leon Keyserling to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., April 9, 1958; cited in Schlesinger Jr.,
The Politics of Upheaval,
pp. 690–92. An analysis by economists arguing that the radical “political shocks” across this period, including the NRA, AAA, TVA, and Wagner Act, impeded business confidence and slowed the recovery rejects any distinction between the First and Second New Deal. See Thomas Mayer and Monojit Chatterji, “Political Shocks and Investment: Some Evidence from the 1930s,”
Journal of Economic History
45 (1985): 913–24. For a rejoinder building on analysis by Joseph Schumpeter, see Antony Patrick O’Brien, “Were Businessmen Afraid of FDR? A Comment on Mayer and Chatterji,” ibid., 50 (1990): 936–41.
99
Carl N. Degler,
Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 416. Chapter 3 is called “The Third American Revolution.”
100
Brinkley,
The End of Reform.
101
See http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrcommonwealth.htm.
102
Los Angeles Times,
June 29, 1934; http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat5.html.
103
See http://www.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his2341/fdr36acceptancespeech.htm.
104
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 6, 1937; “Second Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1937, in
Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
1932–1945
, ed. B. D. Zevin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 79–87.
105
Ibid.
106
Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” in
Nothing to Fear
, ed. Zevin, p. 81.
107
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Rendezvous with Destiny,” June 27, 1936, in
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 235.
108
Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” in
Nothing to Fear
, ed. Zevin, p. 86.
109
Ibid.
110
The law also banned stock trading in unregulated markets; regulated credit and restricted borrowing and lending for stock purchases; regulated stockbrokers by providing powers to censure, penalize, and bar them from trading; prohibited the manipulation of stock prices, insider trading, and deceptive practices; mandated regular and transparent reporting; and established rules for securities litigation. In 1936, Congress further enlarged the SEC’s responsibilities to include over-the-counter securities.
111
New York Times
, June 28, 1933; “Comments: The Tennessee Valley Authority Act,”
Yale Law Journal
43 (1934): 815–26.
112
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., April 24, 1933, p. 2273.
113
New York Times,
April 11, 1933.
114
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., April 24, 1933, pp. 2257, 2273.
115
Ibid., p. 2276.
116
Ibid., 73d Cong., 1st sess., April 22, 1933, p. 2202.
117
Ibid., April 24, 1933, p. 2255.
118
Marked on passage and agreement to the conference report by intra–Democratic Party likeness scores of 99 and 94 in the House and 98 and 97 in the Senate. See
Washington Post
, March 1, 1934;
New York Times
, March 25, 1934. For a contemporaneous overview, see also Thomas R. Henry, “Muscle Shoals: Proving Ground of the New Deal,”
Los Angeles Times,
April 28, 1934.
119
For a retrospective evaluation of this collaboration by an official of the TVA, see Lawrence L. Durisch, “Local Government and the T.V.A. Program,”
Public Administration Review
1 (1941): 326–34.
120
Grandfather of the novelist Gore Vidal.
121
Philip Selznick,
TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), p. 112.
122
Daniel R. Goldfield,
Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), p. 29. For a powerful and comprehensive overview, see Nancy Grant,
TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). For studies that largely elide these issues, see Walter L. Creese,
TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision and the Reality
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and Erwin C. Hargrove,
Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–1990
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
123
In 1928, when northern Alabama’s political leaders mobilized evangelical fervor to oppose the Democratic presidential nominee, Alfred E. Smith, for his views about Prohibition, “South Alabama Democratic loyalists,” led by Steagall, “trumped this rebellious nativism and temperance enthusiasm with racism, sectionalism, Jacksonian defense of the right to have a drink when a man (or woman) felt like it, and their own brand of religious bigotry. . . . Rep. Henry B. Steagall even blasted Smith’s Republican opponent, Herbert Hoover, as an evolutionist and wondered how orthodox Protestant ministers could support such a man.” See Wayne Flint,
Alabama in the Twentieth Century
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), p. 46.
124
Carter Glass to Walter Lippmann, August 10, 1933; cited in Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
, p. 13. His letters, archived at the University of Virginia, are full of such judgments.
125
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., June 13, 1933, p. 5896.
126
Ibid., May 22, 1933, pp. 3930, 3935.