Penguin History of the United States of America
Page 79
However, the decisive argument in the opinion, which Chief Justice Hughes9 himself drafted and delivered, lay in its opening pages. The government had argued that the codes, and the NIRA generally, were justified by the need to fight the Depression. Hughes did not condescend to ask whether the fate of the national economy really depended on what happened to an unfit chicken. Instead he took the argument seriously. ‘Extraordinary conditions,’ he allowed, ‘may call for extraordinary remedies. But… Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power. The Constitution established a national government with powers deemed to be adequate, as they have proved to be both in war and peace; but these powers of the national government are limited by the constitutional grants.’ And he had no difficulty in showing, indeed his style suggests that he took considerable intellectual pleasure in showing, that the grants of power made by Congress to the President in the codes provision of the NIRA were far beyond the limits imposed by the Constitution, amounting to ‘an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power’ – for they enabled the President to make what laws he liked for the regulation of any economic activity whatever. His case was unanswerable.
‘Black Monday’ was seen as a mortal blow to the New Deal. It proved to be nothing of the sort. Most of the useful parts of the NIRA, Title I (Title II, which set up the PWA, was unaffected), were soon re-enacted, with greater care for the letter of the law, and survived all challenge, and Roosevelt was soon producing fresh bursts of valid legislation. The role and power of Washington in the national life continued to grow. But the Supreme Court had sharply reminded Roosevelt of his own self-proclaimed mission, to show that the resources of democracy were not exhausted and that the American Constitution was equal to the demands made of it. That mission could hardly be achieved by violating the Constitution. Roosevelt learned his lesson, and we may be thankful for it. The whole episode shows, not only how far he was from being a revolutionary, but how solid were the constraints on his actions. ‘Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power’: so long as Americans were determined to stick to that maxim and to the values it implies, no President – not even one so popular as Roosevelt, in a crisis so deep as the Depression – could govern alone; and as for becoming a dictator (the constant complaint of FDR’s enemies), it was impossible.
Section 7(a) was rescued by the Wagner Act, named after its chief architect, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, which was signed by the President on 5 July 1935. The National Labor Relations Act (its official title) strengthened and extended the rights gained by the unions under the NIRA and gave John Lewis his second wind. His leadership of the miners in the twenties had not been very successful: following a great strike in 1922, in which some twenty strike-breakers were killed but nothing else was achieved, he had had to watch his influence decline and the membership of his union slump while the industry decayed under the triple weight of over-production, over-manning and under-investment. The Depression made everything far worse: by 1933 membership of the UMW was down to 150,000, and Lewis feared that communist organizations might succeed in their challenge to his leadership. But 7(a) gave him his chance. The word went out (not only to the miners) that ‘President Roosevelt wants you to join the union’ (which was going rather beyond the facts, for in this as in other matters Roosevelt started from a more conservative position than was always recognized) and soon Lewis had a revived membership of 500,000, thanks largely to his vigorous recruiting. He then embarked on a serious attempt to get the AFL to abandon its traditions and organize industrial unions. The Wagner Act gave him invaluable help. Three months after it was passed the AFL held its annual conference at Atlantic City. Opposed to Lewis were the heirs of Gompers, the leaders of the old craft unions. With him were such figures as David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union10 and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. There was a frightful row; at one stage Lewis got involved in a fight with another union leader, and three weeks later he and his friends founded the Committee for Industrial Organization (after 1938, the Congress of Industrial Organizations) which set up as a rival of the AFL. The CIO successfully unionized the automobile and steel industries, and greatly expanded union membership elsewhere. Stimulated by this competition, the AFL recovered its former vigour and expanded likewise. By 1938 there were some nine million union members in the national workforce. There had been fewer than three million in 1933. These unionists became some of the most dependable supporters of Roosevelt, the New Deal and the Democratic party.
The NRA was a premature experiment in a fully planned economy conducted with inadequate tools. Its failure epitomized the collapse of the New Deal’s attempt to co-operate with business. The history of the Triple A epitomizes its happier relations with another special interest group, the farmers of America. The reason for this comparative success was simple: since the palmy days of the slave power the American political system had repeatedly demonstrated its ability to accommodate interest groups; this indeed was one of the things it did best, and at root the farmers’ problems had grown so intolerable because of the unusual refusal of politicians in the business-dominated twenties to take them seriously. When the Depression converted the Democratic party to the principle of federal aid to the unlucky, and the New Deal took office, the farmers got back their ‘clout’ at Washington and the usual logrolling politics of the US Congress did the rest.11
It is important not to lose sight of essentials. These were the tragic years of American agriculture. The long slow slide downhill of the twenties had ended devastatingly in the Depression, like a disease suddenly entering its terminal phase. The high tariffs of the twenties and the effectiveness of foreign competition had cut the farmers off from their traditional foreign markets: customers who could not sell to the United States could not buy from it. The Depression destroyed the domestic market. Purchasing power in the cities collapsed, and the effects worked back through the chain of textile factories, meat-processors and vegetable-canners to the primary producers. Farm income fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932.12 Even worse, whereas the price of all farm products dropped by more than 50 per cent, the price of the products the farmer had to buy, for living and working (clothes and footwear, for instance), went down only by a third. Among the grim implications of these figures was the collapse of the rural credit system: dozens of small country banks broke, and with them fell both their debtors and their creditors. The remaining banks, desperate to survive, foreclosed their mortgages on farms as soon as payments ceased. Farmers stopped buying anything from the great mail-order houses and dropped their insurance policies. Their ruin thus increased the difficulties of urban capitalists. It was clear that farm prices would be driven even lower if agricultural output continued as high as ever, but no individual farmer dared risk a further loss of income by curtailing his planting and reaping: all voluntary schemes for reducing production failed. So the crisis spread and deepened; nowhere was the Depression more of a calamity than in rural America.
Despair erupted in violence that might have become revolutionary: these were men of the stock of ’76. In the summer and autumn of 1932 there were demonstrations throughout the farm belt. In the spring of 1933 there were renewed outbursts, especially in Iowa, then as now the heart of American farm country, where an organization called the Farm Holiday Association took the lead. Attempts were made to stop the movement of produce to market, and thus, by creating a shortage, to force up prices. They did not succeed. More effective were interruptions of mortgage foreclosures. In the most spectacular of these incidents a crowd of Iowa farmers, masked with blue handkerchiefs, interrupted foreclosure proceedings in a courthouse, threatened to lynch the judge, dragged him outside, put one end of a rope round his neck and the other over a limb of a tree, and then, after half-throttling him, making him say his prayers, throwing dirt at him, and yet, in spite of all, failing to intimidate him, gave up the enterprise, merely stripping off his trousers and smearing him with
axle grease. It could have been worse, and in other countries unquestionably would have been; but the episode seemed a shocking warning in America.
So no wonder the Roosevelt administration lost no time in tackling the farm problem. The Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace of Iowa, was an old hand: his father had been Secretary in Harding’s Cabinet, whose efforts to help the farms had been regularly frustrated by the opposition of Herbert Hoover. The younger Wallace had abandoned the Republicans in disgust in 1928. Now he could put his lifetime’s devotion to scientific agriculture and the farmers’ cause to good account. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was his instrument. It was to be even more riven by feuds between radicals and conservatives than the NRA, but it enjoyed far more consistent political support; and the shape it gave to American agriculture has lasted to the present day.
That shape was in large measure predetermined. In the first place, all agreed that the central problem was the frightful disparity between industrial and agricultural prices. According to the enabling Act the Triple A was set up precisely to deal with this problem. The farmers’ favourite remedy was dumping: that is, the purchase of the agricultural surplus at a good price by the government and its disposal overseas for whatever it would fetch. Wallace and his more radical associates, such as the Assistant Secretary, Rexford Tugwell (one of the Brain Trusters), were against this practice, since it was highly injurious to America’s trading relations with other countries; they held off as long as they could; but by the end of the thirties the perpetual surplus of American agriculture was forcing them, in spite of their convictions, to dump, if only because storage was getting to be frighteningly expensive. During most of the New Deal, nevertheless, this last resort was forestalled by more novel devices. Of these the most spectacular was the curtailment of production that was undertaken in the first months of the Roosevelt administration. Industry, it was reasoned, cut back when demand fell off: agriculture must do the same. American traditions were still too strong for the New Dealers to allow themselves to resort to compulsion (though at the time the farmers would probably have welcomed it); instead they bought the farmers’ acquiescence. The proceeds of a special tax on processing (canning meat, milling grain and so on) were used to compensate generously farmers who agreed to plough up their cotton crops, or restrict their acreage of wheat planting or slaughter their baby pigs. Ten million acres of cotton that might have made shirts and dresses were dug under; six million piglets were murdered prematurely, and although some of the meat was used by the government to supplement the diet of the urban unemployed, nine-tenths of it was inedible. There was an immense outcry from the public. Wallace was disgusted. ‘To hear them talk,’ he said, ‘you would have thought that pigs were raised for pets.’
Nevertheless the public had a point, as Wallace well knew. The destruction of food and fibre, in a world where so many (even in normal times) went hungry and naked, was an obscenity; and Wallace was aware that it was the fault of the ‘profit system’, as he and the President termed it, that the abundance of America could not be distributed to the needy of, say, China, or even of the USA. Only wholesale socialization of the American economy – in a word, revolution, peaceable or otherwise – might begin to remedy the evil; and there was all too much reason to doubt that even revolution could do the trick (it had failed spectacularly in the USSR). So the starving Chinese would have to fend for themselves, while Americans solved the problem of abundance by destroying the abundance, as one observer put it. They were startlingly successful. The emergency measures of 1933 did something; then in 1934 and 1935 came dust-storms. The Great Plains had entered the dry phase of the climatic cycle once more; there was a prolonged drought; exhausted and neglected by the greedy methods of traditional farming, the soil of western Kansas, Oklahoma, the Texan panhandle and eastern Colorado blew away on the gales. Eventually it darkened the skies over Washington, DC, stained the winter snows of New England red and fell upon ships 300 miles out on the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of farming families were ruined and took their hopeless way west, pathetic caricatures of the pioneers, to charity camps in California. The price of farm products began to rise, falteringly at first, from their low point in 1932, and had nearly doubled by 1937; and those farmers who weathered the storms began to prosper again, assisted by a flood of new programmes out of Washington – conservation programmes, electrification programmes, resettlement programmes. A divided Supreme Court, in one of the worst decisions in its history, struck down the original Agricultural Act in January 1936 (US v. Butler et al.), but the essential parts were quickly re-enacted (it was election year) under the guise of a soil conservation law, and in 1938 the farm programme was put on a permanent footing by a new AAA. Washington, having literally set its hand to the plough, would not look back.
This became the secret of the farmers’ strength. During the decades of neglect they had been, though still so large a part of the population, not voiceless, but ineffective in national politics. Now they could always be sure of a hearing, and a respectful one too, for neither the White House nor a Democratic Congress, in which Senators and Representatives from the cotton South held dominating positions, was going to alienate so large a block of citizens (roughly 25 per cent of the population) by withdrawing favours to which they had got used. Especially not since the activities of the AAA taught the farmers, far better than the Populists had ever managed, how to unite and organize. Under the AAA it was the farmers, meeting and voting, who decided how many acres should be taken out of production every year and supervised each other to make sure that the reduction actually occurred. All the other programmes were administered in the same manner. By the end of the thirties the farmers were no longer the desperate clients of Washington: they gave terms to the bureaucracy. Once more vast surpluses built up (in federally paid-for granaries); only now they threatened not the farmer, but the national government, with financial disaster. Henry Wallace was landed with the responsibility; he was nearly at his wits’ end as to how to discharge it when he was elevated to the Vice-Presidency, and then war, which brought an insatiable need for all supplies, came to the rescue, and the American surplus began to reach the starving world at last.
The fact that the New Deal was less in command of events than it seemed was well illustrated by another aspect of the farm programmes. The farmers who took the lead in the administration of the AAA were not the worst-hit victims of the Depression: not the sharecroppers of the South, the tenants of the Middle West, the hired hands everywhere, the illiterate, the black, the ignorant, the smallholders trying to live off pocket-handkerchief holdings, owners of exhausted land, or young men and women forced to stay on the land because there was no work in the cities.13 Apart from every other obstacle in their way they were often too ill-fed to have enough energy to stand up for themselves in meetings at the end of a hard day’s work. So the big commercial farmers and, in the South, the landlords carried all before them, greatly helped by the fact that AAA subsidies were paid, as it were, to acres, not individuals: the bigger the farm, therefore, the more money the farmer received from the government. With abundant collusion from within Congress and the Department of Agriculture they strengthened their position more ruthlessly and determinedly than big business did under NRA, and with far more permanent success. The reforming followers of Tugwell within the administration, the organizations of poorer farmers outside it, made no great headway against them; and the ebb of the Depression diminished such sense of social solidarity as had been induced in 1932. In short, the renewed prosperity benefited the strong farmer; the weak suffered much as before; and after 1941 (when the factory boom of the Second World War opened up the job market again) the movement from the land to the cities resumed. It was probably an economically necessary process; but the human and political gains to America would have been enormous if the movement could have been regulated with intelligence and compassion, instead of being left, in the old way, to the brutally impersonal operations of ‘the profit system
’, which were only marginally braked by the commitment of the New Deal and succeeding administrations to maintain the existing farm population in situ. Agriculture Secretaries came and went and made the same pledges to uphold the small family farm (anything was better than the effort and conflict involved in thinking out a new policy); but the number of such farms went on shrinking, and nobody did much for the displaced.
That things might have been happier was demonstrated by the third major enterprise of the New Deal, the great relief operation.
It is almost impossible to give a coherent account of the evolution of the Roosevelt programme for poor relief. Critics of FDR’s administrative methods (they were and are numerous) can point in scorn to the fact that the programme changed its form almost yearly – in early days, more than yearly. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration was largely replaced by the Civil Works Administration, which then gave way to FERA again; then came the period of consolidation under the Works Progress Administration, which was cut back in 1937 and re-expanded in 1938; and all the time the incessant rivalries of the New Deal, in this case predominantly between Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins,14 meant that there were always at least two major relief organizations: for whatever else might come and go, the P W A went on until the outbreak of the Second World War, though Roosevelt at one stage thought he had abolished it.
This is not a tidy picture; but the Depression was not a tidy phenomenon, and it could not be effectively fought by the tidy methods of an Ickes. Nothing in Roosevelt’s career mattered more to him, ultimately, than the task of rescuing the millions of innocent victims of the great storm and of transforming American attitudes to them. Indeed, though it was long before he fully recognized it, one of his chief historical tasks was the foundation of the American welfare state. For this great undertaking he had, in Harry Hopkins, a man in whom ‘the purity of St Francis of Assisi combined with the sharp shrewdness of a race-track tout’,15 the perfect instrument. Hopkins was as loose in his methods as Ickes was tight. Working on a tiny salary, from a dim little office, with an exiguous if devoted staff, by methods that might have been designed to appal the Bureau of the Budget (if so they certainly succeeded), he yet spent his way through more money than any other single New Dealer, transformed the lives of more Americans, revolutionized attitudes to unemployment, and incidentally did more than any man next to the President himself to make over the Democratic party. He destroyed his health in the process, otherwise the President might have picked him as his own successor. He was widely regarded as Roosevelt’s evil genius, but this former social worker from Iowa, with his selfless passion for the public service and his fondness for Keats and horse-racing, rendered, in peace as in war, ‘a service to his country which will never even vaguely be appreciated’16 because it was, literally, incalculable.