Authors: Ira Katznelson
127
His amendment to include state banks was defeated by a 20–68 margin. Steagall explained that at issue was the security of depositors, and that all banks, including state banks, would have to be examined for solvency by federal authorities. See ibid., May 23, 1933, pp. 4034–36.
128
Ibid., May 22, 1933, p. 3925.
129
Ibid., May 25, 1933, p. 4170.
130
Wth Democratic Party likeness scores of 95 and 99.
131
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 2d sess., April 30, 1934, pp. 7695, 7696.
132
Ibid., May 2, 1934, p. 7926; May 4, 1934, p. 8097.
133
Ibid., p. 7941; May 4, 1934, p. 8090. Opponents of this bill, as with other New Deal legislation, emphasized, as the Kansas House Republican Harold McGugin insisted, that “this bill bears the same tyranny which is found in much of our-so-called ‘emergency legislation.’ Russia, Germany, and Italy are not the only countries in which citizens are being imprisoned for the violation of edicts.” See ibid., May 3, 1934, p. 8012.
134
For a discussion, see Michael Goldfield, “Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation,”
American Political Science Review
83 (1989): 1257–82.
135
National Labor Relations Act of 1935, §§ 7–9, as passed, reprinted in
Legislative History of the National Labor Relations Act, 1935,
comp. National Labor Relations Board (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959); 74th Cong., 1st sess., 1935, H. Doc. 1147, pp. 15–23; William B. Gould,
A Primer on American Labor Law
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 45–46. The standard history is James A. Gross,
The Making of the National Labor Relations Board: A Study in Economics, Politics, and Law: 1933–1937
, vol. 1 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974). His discussion of implementation is found in James A. Gross,
The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–1947,
vol. 2 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). See also Murray Edelman, “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Interests,” in
Labor and the New Deal,
ed. Milton Derber and Edwin Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 157–91; David Plotke, “The Wagner Act, Again: Politics and Labor, 1935–1937,”
Studies in American Political Development
3 (1989): 104–56; Mark Barenberg, “The Political Economy of the Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, and Workplace Cooperation,”
Harvard Law Review
106 (1993): 1379–406.
136
National Labor Relations Act of 1935, § 8(a)(2), reprinted in
Legislative History of the National Labor Relations Act, 1935
,
comp. National Labor Relations Board, 74th Cong., 1st sess., 1935, H. Doc. 1147, pp. 17–19; Gould,
A Primer on American Labor Law,
p. 47.
137
National Labor Relations Act of 1935, §§ 3–6, 10–12, reprinted in
Legislative History of the National Labor Relations Act, 1935
, comp. National Labor Relations Board; 74th Cong., 1st sess., 1235, H. Doc. 1147, pp. 11–15; 23–25. See Frank W. McCulloch and Tim Bornstein,
The National Labor Relations Board
(New York: Praeger, 1974). Gross,
The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board,
pp. 132–36, discusses the relatively greater power and independence of the NLRB under the NLRA than previous labor boards had held.
138
For an early assessment, see Lois MacDonald, “The National Labor Relations Act,”
American Economic Review
26 (1936): 412–27.
139
Despite their focus on the relationship of price changes and union growth, Ashenfelter and Pencavel acknowledge the importance of what they rather blandly refer to as “a favorable political environment.” See Orley Ashenfelter and John H. Pencavel, “American Trade Union Growth: 1900–1960,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
83 (1969): 446.
140
Leo Wolman, “Concentration of Union Membership,”
Proceedings of Fifth Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952); cited in Milton Derber, “Growth and Expansion,” in
Labor and the New Deal
, ed. Milton Derber and Edwin Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1957), p. 17.
141
Levels and durations varied, as these were set by the states.
142
Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear,
p. 261.
143
At a likeness level of 85.
144
For a compelling analysis of the filibuster pivot in this Congress, see Brian R. Sala, “Time for a Change: Pivotal Politics and the 1935 Wagner Act,” unpublished paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, April 2002.
145
Congressional Record,
74th Cong., 1st sess., May 16, 1935, p. 7657.
146
With a likeness level of 88.
147
U.S. Committee on Economic Security,
Report to the President
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), p. 49; cited in Robert Lieberman,
Shifting the Color
Line: Race and the American Welfare State
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 31.
148
Congressional Research Service, “Legislative History of the Exclusion of Agricultural Employees from the National Labor Relations Act, 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938” (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1966), pp. 1, 4.
149
Southerners joined other Democrats in the Senate with a likeness level of 92 to pass the labor bill, and with an identical level of 98 in the House and Senate votes to pass the Social Security Act. In these cross-partisan votes, southern Democrat–Republican likeness on labor scored 72 in the Senate and 86 in the House, and 75 in the Senate vote on Social Security.
150
Congressional Record,
74th Cong., 1st sess., April 19, 1935, p. 6041.
151
Michael Anthony Butler,
Cordell Hull and Trade Reform, 1933–1937
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), p. 7.
152
House, “Amend Tariff Act of 1930: Reciprocal Trade Agreements,” 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1934, H. Doc. 1000, pp. 1–3.
153
The classic study, based on a close analysis of the process that produced the Smoot-Hawley tariff revision law of 1930, is E. E. Schattschneider,
Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1935). A recent thoughtful consideration is Douglas A. Irwin,
Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
154
About this there was “tremendous predictability,” as the tariff was “a defining issue of partisan politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” See Michael A. Bailey, Judith Goldstein, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Institutional Roots of American Trade Policy: Politics, Coalitions, and International Trade,”
World Politics
49 (1997): 311.
155
John Mark Hansen, “Taxation and the Political Economy of the Tariff,”
International Organization
44 (1990): 543.
156
During the go-go decade that preceded this statute, America’s imports dropped by 31 percent and its exports by 44 percent as high tariffs took hold. See Judith Goldstein,
Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 94. For her incisive accounts of the protectionist era, which she dates from 1870 to 1930, and the subsequent liberalization of trade, see pp. 81–182. For a table of tariff legislation partisanship, see Michael J. Hiscox, “The Magic Bullet? The RTAA, Institutional Reform, and Trade Liberalization,”
International Organization
53 (1999): 692.
157
Schattschneider,
Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff,
p. 7.
158
For party-oriented accounts of trade legislation, see Robert Pastor,
Congress and the Politics of United States Foreign Economic Policy, 1929–1977
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; Colleen M. Callahan, Judith A. McDonald, and Anthony Patrick O’Brien, “Who Voted for Smoot-Hawley?”
Journal of Economic History
54 (1994): 683–90.
159
The jury is still out. A strongly argued revisionist case to the effect that Smoot-Hawley has an undeserved harsh reputation can be found in Alfred E. Eckes Jr.,
Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 100–139. A careful study attributing 25 percent of America’s trade loss between 1930 and 1932 to Smoot-Hawley is Douglas A. Irwin, “The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment,”
Review of Economics and Statistics
80 (1998): 326–34.
160
Congressional Record,
71st Cong., 1st sess., May 10, 1929, p. 1134.
161
Ibid., May 11, 1929, p. 1159.
162
Ibid., May 13, 1929, p. 1208.
163
House, “Amend Tariff Act of 1930,” p. 5.
164
The fullest statement of Cordell Hull’s reasoning, including the claim that active trade is a force for world peace as well as for economic recovery, is the statement he read to the House Ways and Means Committee on March 8, 1934, printed in full in the
New York Times,
March 9, 1934.
165
Susanne Lohmann and Sharyn O’Halloran, “Divided Government and U.S. Trade Policy: Theory and Evidence,”
International Organization
48 (1994): 595–632.
166
Bailey, Goldstein, and Weingast, “The Institutional Roots of American Trade Policy,” p. 318.
167
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 2d sess., March 27, 1934, p. 5547.
168
Ibid., March 26, 1934, p. 5451.
169
Ibid., March 23, 1934, p. 5258.
170
V. O. Key Jr.,
Southern Politics in State and Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 353.
171
Party likeness reached 94 in the Senate, 96 in the House. Southern Democratic–Republican likeness was a mere 3, and overall Democratic-Republican likeness stood only at 6.
172
Lester J. Dickinson, “What’s the Matter with Congress?,”
American Mercury
37 (1936): 129; cited in Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
pp. 69–70.
173
New York Times,
January 5, 1937.
174
To a total of 193 in the House and 43 in the Senate.
175
Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
p. 160.
176
He continued to serve through 1940, when a Democrat, James Tunnell, took the seat, putting only Democrats in the Senate across the South.
177
Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
pp. 97–99, 110, 156–57. Patterson is right to point out that Democratic defections were not limited to the South, and that none of the Republican opponents was southern; but, as he observes, this voting pattern heralded a growing sectional division within the party, one that was to become more fateful during the mid- and late 1940s.
178
Bruce J. Schulman,
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980
(Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 57–58, 63–87.
179
Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie, “Patermalism in Agricultural Contracts in the U.S. South: Implications for the Growth of the Welfare State,”
American Economic Review
83 (1993): 852–76. In itself, sharecropping was not simply racial. Every census from 1880 to 1940 shows more white than black sharecroppers and tenants in the South, but a significantly higher proportion of black farmers fell into these categories.
180
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 2d sess., December 13, 1937, p. 1404. Representative Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat, articulated the same concern, stating that a “racial question” was implicated by the FLSA because under its minimum-wage provisions “what is prescribed for one race must be prescribed for the others, and you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man.” Echoing Wilcox and Dies, Georgia Democratic representative Edward Cox complained that “organized Negro groups of the country are supporting [the FLSA] because it will . . . render easier the elimination and disappearance of racial and social distinctions, and . . . throw into the political field the determination of the standards and the customs which shall determine the relationship of our various groups of people in the South.” See Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
p. 195.
Congressional Record
, 75th Cong., 2d sess., 1937, p. 442 (appendix).
181
John W. Tait, “The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,”
University of Toronto Law Journal
6 (1945): 193.
182
See http://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/faculty-research/new-deal/roosevelt-speeches/fr052437.htm.
183
Tait, “The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,” p. 197.
184
“Ghost of the NRA” is the title of chapter 4 in the excellent history by George E. Paulsen,
A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man: The Quest for Fair Labor Standards, 1933–1941.
(London: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 68–81.
185
With a likeness score of 80.
186
Suzanne Mettler,
Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy
(Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pps. 185, 204, 209.
187
Congressional Research Service, “Legislative History of the Exclusion of Agricultural Employees,” p. 11.
188
With a likeness score of 60.