Fear Itself (95 page)

2
Christy is best known to New Yorkers as the artist who painted the six panels of wood nymphs that were installed at the Café des Artistes on West Sixty-seventh Street in 1934. His more chaste and immense 1940 painting,
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,
hangs along the east stairway of the U.S. House of Representatives.

3
New York Times,
September 14, 1933.

4
Wall Street Journal,
September 15, 1933.

5
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 246.

6
For an important essay on the use of wartime metaphors by President Roosevelt and other New Dealers, see William E. Leuchtenburg,
The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 35–75.

7
Radio appeal for the NRA, July 24, 1933; available at http://teachingamerican history.org/library/index.asp?document=2562.

8
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt,
vol. 2,
The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 116.

9
See http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat3.html.

10
Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 105.

11
Rexford G. Tugwell, “Design for Government,”
Political Science Quarterly
48 (1933): 323.

12
New York Times,
June 15 and June 17, 1933. For a discussion of the business conservatism of the NIRA, a law, he claims, that gave American capitalists what they wanted, see Colin Gordon,
New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 166–203. This view elaborates the perspective advanced earlier by Ellis W. Hawley,
The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).

13
New York Times,
June 18, 1933.

14
T. H. Watkins,
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America
(New York: Holt, 2000), p. 188.

15
Overall, the best analysis of the law’s character and implications remains Donald R. Brand,
Corporatism and the Rule of Law: A Study of the National Recovery Administration
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). For a discussion of the price goals of the Recovery Act, and how it was embedded within an economic analysis about the role of underconsumption in the Depression, see Meg Jacobs,
Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 107.

16
Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 428. Oklahoma’s Democratic representative Ernest Marland had introduced a bill in mid-May that became the basis for the oil provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act. See
New York Times,
May 20, 1933. At the start of June, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes recommended the inclusion of this set of special oil-control provisions within the Recovery Act with the support of President Roosevelt. See ibid., June 2, 1933.

17
Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine,
John L. Lewis: A Biography
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 133. Lewis declared that “organized labor is a single unit in its approval of the objectives of the National Industrial Recovery Act . . . the support of organized labor, in a fundamental sense, is without reservation.” See John L. Lewis, “Labor and the National Recovery Administration,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
172 (1934): 58. Green is cited by Marjorie R. Clark, “Recent History of Labor Organization,” ibid., 184 (1936): 161. Likewise, Sidney Hillman, who led the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, underscored how the NRA had successfully regulated the hours of work and secured a legal means to undercut competition that had cut wages below a decent minimum. See Hillman, “The NRA, Labor, and Recovery,” ibid., 172 (1934): 70–71. See also Edwin E. Witte, “The Background of the Labor Provisions of the N.I.R.A.,”
University of Chicago Law Review
1 (1934): 572–79. Witte stressed the ambiguous quality of labor rights, including some opacity about whether business could satisfy the bill’s labor provisions by creating and recognizing company unions.

18
Cited in Ruth L. Horowitz,
Political Ideologies of Organized Labor: The New Deal Era
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977), p. 101. Looking back, we might judge that these provisions did not do quite as much for unions as some labor leaders had anticipated, in part because the statute was charged with ambiguity about how workers might be represented.

19
Schlesinger,
The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935,
pp. 116–18.

20
For a comparative discussion, see J. P. Mayer,
Political Thought: The European Tradition
(London: J. M. Dent, 1939), pp. 407–14. Otto Nathan, an economist (and close friend of Albert Einstein) who had advised the Weimar government and who specialized in analyses of the Nazi economic system, offered a thoughtful evaluation of how the Recovery Act contributed to economic stabilization in the United States in “The N.I.R.A. and Stabilization,”
American Economic Review
25 (1935): 44–58. For an account of how the NRA drew not only on overseas models but also on homegrown experiences, see Glenn Lowell Clayton, “The Development of the Concept of National Planning in the United States” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1948).

21
“The Washington Alphabet: New Deal Agencies,”
New York Times,
March 4, 1934.

22
Tugwell, “Design for Government,” pp. 327, 328, 325.

23
Donald R. Richberg, “Progress under the National Recovery Act,”
Proceedings of the American Academy of Political Science
15 (1934): 25.

24
A compact and largely positive contemporaneous overview was provided by the American Institute of Banking,
Anti-Depression Legislation, 1933
(New York: American Institute of Banking, 1934). On conservation, see Sarah T. Phillips,
This Land, This
Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

25
New York Times,
July 7, 1933.

26
Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

27
Richard Hofstadter,
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. x.

28
For a discussion, see Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, Associationalism, and the Great Depression Relief Crisis of 1930–1933,” in
With Us Always: A History of Private Charity and Public Welfare,
ed. Donald T. Critchlow and Charles M. Parker (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 161–90.

29
Candidate Franklin Roosevelt took up the theme of budget balance, likening the federal budget to that of a family, in a campaign address in Pittsburgh on October 19, 1932. See http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88399#axzz1sJL6a7rt.

30
Cited in Julian E. Zelizer, “The Forgotten Legacy of New Deal Fiscal Conservatism and the Roosevelt Administration, 1933–1938,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
30 (2000): 335. This article underscores this aspect of New Deal policy until 1938, and stresses the roles played by Lewis Douglas, who directed the Bureau of the Budget from March 1933 to August 1934, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served from 1934 to 1945. For further discussions, see James D. Savage,
Balanced Budgets and American Politics
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Michael K. Brown,
Race, Money, and the American Welfare State
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

31
Roosevelt,
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 2, p. 50.

32
Tugwell, “Design for Government,” pp. 326, 330.

33
Herbert Hoover, “The Challenge to Liberty,”
Saturday Evening Post,
September 8, 1934, pp. 6, 69.

34
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., May 26, 1933, p. 4333.

35
Ibid., May 25, 1933, p. 4188.

36
Ibid., May 5, 1933, p. 4217.

37
Ibid., May 25, 1933, p. 4211.

38
Ibid.

39
Cited in Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal,
p. 433.

40
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., May 25, 1933, p. 4207.

41
Alonzo L. Hamby,
For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s
(New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 116.

42
Patrick D. Reagan,
Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 6–7.

43
Washington Post,
June 21, 1933.

44
New York Times,
July 7, 1933.

45
Richberg, “Progress under the National Recovery Act,” p. 25. This analysis anticipated how John Dewey would distinguish totalitarian from democratic economics later in the decade. See John Dewey,
Freedom and Culture
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), pp. 74–102.

46
Richberg, “Progress under the National Recovery Act,” pp. 6, 29. In this summary of New Deal values and positions, Richberg anticipated the “radical distinction” between state corporatism, which relies primarily on constraints, and societal corporatism, which relies primarily on inducements, famously put forward by the political scientist Philippe Schmitter some four decades ago. See Philippe Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?,”
Review of Politics
36 (1974): 103, 93, 103–4, 105. See also Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, “Inducement versus Constraints: Disaggregating ‘Corporatism,’”
American Political Science Review
73 (1979): 967–86.

47
Richberg, “Progress under the National Recovery Act,” pp. 28, 30. See also Roger Shaw, “Fascism and the New Deal,”
North American Review
238 (1934): 559, 562, 561, 560, 562; Lewis L. Lorwin, “The Plan State and the Democratic Ideal,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
180 (1935): 114–18. This article was a contribution to a special issue on “Socialism, Fascism, and Democracy.”

48
Lewis L. Lorwin, “Some Political Aspects of Economic Planning,”
American Political Science Review
26 (1932): 727.

49
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., June 7, 1933, p. 5306.

50
Ibid., May 25, 1933, p. 4188.

51
Ibid., May 26, 1933, p. 4358.

52
Ibid., May 25, 1933, p. 4223.

53
Ibid., June 10, 1933, p. 5700.

54
Ibid., June 7, 1933, p. 5185.

55
Ibid., May 25, 1933, p. 4202.

56
For a discussion of this “alternative philosophy,” see Anthony J. Badger,
FDR: The First Hundred Days
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), pp. 95–98.

57
The party’s likeness scores were, respectively, 96, 99, 96, and 93. For a discussion of the vote concerning the allocation of subsidies for road construction, see Richard Bensel,
Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880–1980
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 155–56.

58
With a likeness score of 92. Inside the Finance Committee, all but the public works provisions of the bill had nearly been defeated by a coalition that included two nonsouthern Democrats (William King of Utah and William McAdoo of California), two conservative southern Democrats (Josiah Bailey of North Carolina and Harry Byrd of Virginia), and three southern Democrats who wanted the bill to be tougher on business (Champ Clark of Missouri, Tom Connally of Texas, and Thomas Gore of Oklahoma).

59
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., May 25, 1933, p. 4202.

60
Roger K. Newman,
Hugo Black: A Biography
(New York: Pantheon, 1994), pp. 159–61.

61
Senator Black thus proposed an amendment that would have allowed all states to have representation and equal voting power in any industry code group. The amendment would also have granted equal representation to firms within an industry regardless of their size or their relative power. He explained that “seventy-five percent [of industry] is in 134 of over 3,000 counties. Fifty percent of it is in 34 counties out of over 3,000 counties. It means that unless we provide legislatively for equal representation of the States in those new law-making trade associations, the great majority of States will have no voting chance at all.” The amendment was rejected 25–41, with supporters coming from the economically less developed states in the West as well as the South. See
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., June 8, 1933, pp. 5285–5286.

62
These were Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, Huey Long of Louisiana, Matthew Neely of West Virginia, and Robert Reynolds of North Carolina.

63
The majority was constituted by twenty southern Democrats, twenty-one nonsouthern Democrats, and five Republicans.

64
Congressional Record,
73d Cong., 1st sess., June 8, 1933, 5241.