The New Deal:  III

The National Recovery Administration (NRA)
Administrator:  Gen. Hugh S. Johnson (ret.)
Dates:  1933-1935

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) had the job of gathering representatives from various industries together to draw up fair practice codes.  These codes would help eliminate the harmful aspects of competition by establishing minimum prices and wages.  Businesses could then rest easy, secure in the knowledge that their "competitors" would not try to undersell them.  In return for signing one of the codes, a business or industry was entitled to fly the flag of the blue eagle--the symbol of the NRA.  Why a flag?  Well, the government didn't require business and industry to sign the codes--it was strictly voluntary--but hoped that public patriotism would lead consumers to patronize only those establishments cooperting with the New Deal.  (Consumers, too, could sign a pledge to patronize only NRA stores.)  The NRA program initially garnered a lot of enthusiasm, particularly among small businessmen, but it quickly ran into problems.  For example, it was difficult to gather members of a particular industry, large and small, who'd competed against each other for years, and get them to agree on common standards.  Bigger businesses, for example, could afford lower prices and wages than a smaller business.  Some industries objected to the NRA on principle, since it would hamper their ability to control their business.  Finally, many did not want to agree to allow their workers to join unions, which was a guarantee under Section 7 (a).   Soon, many businesses who had signed the codes ceased to observe them because they believed too many of their competitors were cheating, or because they believed they program was not working overall.  The issue became moot in May of 1935 when the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional in the Schechter decision.  The Court said the NRA had violated existing anti-trust laws by hampering competition.  Ironically, at the time of the Court's decision, many industries had still not signed any code.

The Public Works Administration (PWA)

Administrator:  Harold Ickes
Dates:  1934-1949**
(**these dates are vague, as many PWA projects were later subsumed by other federal agencies, such as the WPA and the FWA, but the National Archives and Record Administration lists the termination date for PWA records as 1949)

The PWA dispensed over $3 billion to the states in a series of public works projects designed to stimulate the local economy.  Headed by Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, the PWA, like other programs of the First New Deal, operated through the states.   State PWA committees submitted projects to the PWA, and if the project met government criteria, then the PWA would disburse money to that state for the project.  Many communities submitted projects to build schools and hospitals (or improve existing ones) or to build bridges and roads.  The process was cumbersome, made even more so by Ickes' extreme caution in handing out funds.  In short, the federal structure of the PWA (the system of working trough the state is ironically termed federalism) blunted the purpose of the PWA, which was to spur immediate economic recovery.  Later, many of the PWA projects were taken over by an agency of the Second New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was operated directly from Washington, D. C.