Supreme Effort

''History probably will record the National Industrial Recovery Act as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress. It represents a supreme effort to stabilize for all time the many factors which make for the prosperity of the nation."

Thus last week spoke a happy, happy President as he squiggled ''Franklin D. Roosevelt" at the bottom of the biggest piece of legislation he had gotten from an adjourning Congress. At the signing ceremony Senators and Representatives who had helped to whip the measure through just as the President wanted it beamed their pride and approval over the Roosevelt shoulder.

The special session of the 73rd Congress had hung up an amazing record of achievement in its 14-week sitting. It had sanctioned presidential economies that brought the ordinary budget close to balance. It had taken the U. S. off gold, provided for currency inflation. It had enacted a farm price-fixing bill that made earlier efforts at agricultural relief look puny and insignificant. It had arranged for a $2,000,000,000 refinancing program for farm, mortgages, $2,000,000,000 for home mortgages. Half a billion dollars was voted for direct unemployment relief. The Civilian Conservation Corps was created to put 275,000 idle young men to work in the woods. All these measures were desperate defenses, bulwarks against the immediate tidal wave of economic demoralization.

The Congress had also set up a legislative offensive against hard times. It had passed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, a vast experiment in Federal development of natural resources. The Emergency Railroad Act had provided Federal direction for a program to end wasteful duplication of services among the nation's carriers. The Securities bill was designed to clean up the evils of stock jobbery. The national banking structure had been reformed by the Glass-Steagall bill (see p. 45).

Important as they were, none of these laws compared in might, majesty and magnitude with the National Recovery Act. Into that measure had been packed the greatest public works program ($3,300,000,000) ever undertaken by one government and the largest peacetime powers over industrial wages, hours, prices and output ever given to one man in the U. S. It was President Roosevelt's do-or-die attack against the Depression. Just before he left for Boston on the first leg of his vacation, he gave the country his own estimate of it:

"The law I have just signed was passed to put people back to work--to let them buy more of the products of farms and factories and start our business at a living rate again. This task is in two stages-- first, to get many hundreds of thousands of the unemployed back on the payroll by snowfall; and second, to plan for a better future for the longer pull. . . . As in the great crisis of the World War. it puts a whole people to the simple but vital test: Must we go on in many groping, disorganized, separate units to defeat, or shall we move as one great team to victory?"

Stage One-- "While we shall not neglect the second, the first stage is an emergency job. It has the right of way."

Temporarily appointed Federal Emergency Administrator of Public Works was Col. Donald Hubbard Sawyer. Administrator Sawyer was born in Pulaski, Ill. 53 years ago. A civil engineer since 1902, he built cantonments during the War. In 1923 he came to Washington as secretary for the Associated General Contractors of America. For the past two years he has been director of the obscure Employment Stabilization Board, relic of the Hoover era.

To work with Administrator Sawyer, the President set up a Special Board for Public Works composed of Secretaries of Interior, War, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor, the Attorney General, the Director of the Budget and Col. George R. Spalding, an Army river & harbor engineer who was embarrassed when the Press jumped the gun, reported he would get Col. Sawyer's job.

The executive order creating his office did not empower Administrator Sawyer to spend all the $3,300,000,000 authorized by Congress for public works, at an estimated ratio of a million jobs per billion dollars. His orders were strict. He was given 30 days to distribute $400,000,000 for highway building projects which could be started immediately. President Roosevelt promised to put 1,000,000 men to work by autumn.

Three-quarters of a billion to be spent under the Recovery Act had already been earmarked by President Roosevelt and his Cabinet as follows:

The Navy gets $238,000,000 to build four Treaty cruisers, 20 destroyers, two airplane carriers, four submarines, two river gunboats. Construction will start on those vessels to be built in government yards as soon as material arrives. Those to be privately built will start as soon as bids are in.

The Navy gets $9,000,000 for 290 new airplanes.

The States get $400,000,000 for new roads.

The Post Office and Treasury Departments were to get by Oct. 1 $100,000,000 for new post offices, court houses, quarantine stations and the like to be built from Big Spring, Tex. to Lewiston, Me.

Stage Two. "In my inaugural," said President Roosevelt. ''I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends on paying less than living wages has any right to continue. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry: by workers I mean all workers--the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level --I mean the wages of decent living.

"Throughout industry the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can. in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe."

Though he was letting down the bars of the anti-trust laws that industries might coalesce to regulate prices and wages, the President promised to "stand firmly against monopolies that restrain trade and price-fixing which allows inordinate profits or unfairly high prices. . . . I am fully aware that wage increases will eventually raise costs, but I ask that managements give first consideration to the improvement of operating figures by greatly increased sales to be expected from the rising purchasing power of the public. That is good economics and good business. . . . If we now inflate prices as fast and as far as we increase wages the whole project will be set at naught. . . . If we can . . . start a strong sound upward spiral of business activity our industries will have little doubt of black-ink operations in the last quarter of this year."

The Man who was to rally industry into line was General Hugh Samuel Johnson, West Pointer, lawyer, boys' book writer, associate of Bernard Marines Baruch and originator and administrator of the War-time selective draft. Like Col. Sawyer. General Johnson, as Administrator for Industrial recovery, was given the counsel of the Secretaries of Commerce. Agriculture, Labor; Attorney General. Director of the Budget, Federal Trade Commissioner Chairman. These in turn began last week to draw keymen from the ranks of economists, businessmen, labor leaders to make up advisory boards. The Industrial Advisory Board appointed by Secretary Roper included: General Motors President Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr.; Chairman Walter Clark Teagle of Standard Oil of N. J.; General Electric President Gerard Swope; Chairman Edward Nash Hurley of Chicago's Hurley Machine Co.; Louis Kirstein, vice president of Filene's, Boston department store; Austin Finch, president of Thomasville (N. C.) Chair Co., chairman of the Southern Manufacturer's Association's committee already at work in connection with the recovery act.

To the Labor Advisory Board were ap pointed by Madam Secretary Perkins: Economist Leo Wolman: Joseph Frey, president of International Boilermakers Union; William H. Green, president of the A. F. of L.; Father Francis Haas of the Catholic Welfare Council : Rose Schneiderman, Secretary of the Women's Trades Union League.

Next to be named was a Consumer's Advisory Board representing the public. As outlined by President Roosevelt the whole system would work like this:

When a trade group thought it had settled its wage, price and output problems, it would apply to General Johnson's office for a hearing. The advisory board would designate officials to find out if the trade group was representative of its industry. Other officials would bend their ears to representatives of labor in the industry, still others to consumers of the industry's products. The combined findings would be handed over to the Administrator, who would finally take them to the President for approval. Recalcitrants would be firmly kept in line by a licensing system, operative for one year, which when screwed down hard, would put them out of business.

In the marbled halls of Herbert Hoover's monument, the new Department of Commerce Building, both phases of the Recovery Act are being administered. Last week movers were cluttering up its halls with furniture from the offices of the moribund R. F. C. Pert young clerks by the score were inking up rubber stamps and, like hungry buzzards, Congressmen had already scented out the headquarters of the government's newest and grandest handout.

His pockets bulging with papers like those of a country lawyer, General Johnson left the White House as soon as the President had issued his statement. Unofficially he had been talking to industrialists for weeks about the Recovery Act. That evening he was scheduled to speak to harassed soft-coal men in Chicago. When his airplane was grounded by fog at Pittsburgh. General Johnson addressed his audience by radio. He strongly urged his distant hosts to "put into effect provisions which you find necessary to protect the willing and the forward-looking among your members from the racketeers and price-cutters and those who are willing to take advantage of the unselfishness and public spirit of other men."

At Bryn Mawr, Secretary of Labor Perkins predicted the Recovery Act would "outlaw the sweatshop."

Racketeering in labor was simultaneously attacked when New York's Doctor-Senator Copeland left Washington with a committee to investigate hoodlumism in New York, Detroit, Chicago. The Recovery Act may also be used as a weapon against labor racketeering since an industry's labor will, like its management, be obliged to make a clean breast before the Industrial Recovery Administration.

Into Line. First to submit a model code was the cotton textile industry, through a committee said to represent two-thirds of the textile millers. Pending approval in public hearing June 27, the code provides a minimum wage of $10 a week in southern mills. $11 in the north, a 44-hr, week, and acknowledgement of employes' right to collective bargaining. The coal men in Chicago were preparing a code. The American Petroleum Institute was also doing spadework in Chicago, while to Washington the independents sent their own recommendations. At Bloomfield, Ind., 30 Indiana limestone producers agreed on a code.

Wage increases were taking place all over the country. In Akron, where Newton Diehl Baker was trying to bring harmony to the embattled rubber industry, Goodyear, Firestone. General. Mohawk all announced 10% raises. Seiberling upped pay 5%. The Pittsburgh Coal Co. was paying 10% more to 8,000 workers. Amoskeag Manufacturing Co., largest cotton textile manufacturer, announced a 15% raise at Manchester, N. H. Other textile mills at Dallas, Gadsden, Ala., Lawrence, Mass., Rockville, Conn, swung into line. Canning factories in Florida, a Philadelphia handbag maker, a Suffolk, Va., candy company, upped pay. Sears, Roebuck rescinded a 10% salary cut order.

Problems, Well did General Johnson know that such pay raises as occurred in the past fortnight were influenced by a slight business upturn, were not primarily due to President Roosevelt's Recovery Act. Before the Recovery Act could be given its head, to show whether any democracy can plan its economic future, many a snarly special problem had yet to be thrashed out. Samples:

P:Problem of the rubber industry is the elasticity of crude rubber prices (from $3 a Ib. in 1910 to 2-c- lb. in 1933), controlled by conditions abroad. General Johnson & aides will have to allow for a wide basic price range in manufactured rubber products.

P:Any regulatory code in the copper business will have to allow for: 1) a wide range of production costs between U. S. refineries; 2) new sources of cheap foreign copper, against which the Administration may not want to erect a higher tariff wall.

P:The automobile industry may ask for an average 36-hr, work week, since during its rush months (April, May, June) the industry is geared to a 48-hr, week, tapering off in autumn and winter to less than half of that.

P:Organizing labor will be a major difficulty in the bituminous coal business, one-fifth of which is mined by union men. The other 300,000,000 annual tons is dug by non-union workers.

Possibly to avoid having all these matters dumped on his lap at once until he can think his way through them. General Johnson is not to be found in Room 3053 at the Commerce Building, as advertised. Instead he sits alone behind an unmarked door many yards away.

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