Since Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen

Author:Frederick Lewis Allen [Allen, Frederick Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

§5

Through the years 1934 and 1935, President Roosevelt was sore beset.

Economic recovery was lagging badly. For a measure of what was happening, let us return once more to the Federal Reserve Board’s Adjusted Index of Industrial Production, which gives perhaps the best general indication of economic health. We have seen that the index figure had dropped from its prosperity peak of 125 in 1929 all the way to 58 in the summer of 1932, and again to 59 in the bank-panic month of March, 1933; that it had then bounded to 100 during the New Deal Honeymoon, and slid down to 72 in November, 1933, as the Honeymoon came to an end. Slowly it crept up again, but only to 86 in the spring of 1934. Back it slipped to a discouraging 71 in the fall of 1934. Once more it gained, till at the beginning of 1935 it had reached 90. Then during the spring of 1935 it receded to 85. Not until the last month of 1935 had it fought its way up again to the hundred mark it had attained during those first frenzied months of the New Deal—and this despite the pouring of billions of dollars of relief money into the bloodstream of trade.

The President’s confident proposals for new legislation could not altogether distract public attention from the administrative difficulties which tangled the agencies he had already set up. The NRA appeared to be stimulating dissension rather than production. On the one hand it had virtually invited labor to organize; on the other hand it had turned over the formulation and administration of its hundreds of codes mainly to employers, and was unable to require these employers to recognize the rapidly mushrooming unions, dominated in many cases by inexperienced and over-combative leaders; hence it could not make good on its promise. Disillusioned auto workers were saying that NRA stood for “National Run Around.” A fierce dock strike on the Pacific Coast grew into an attempt to tie up the whole city of San Francisco by a general strike in July, 1934. When the textile code authority called for a cut in production that same summer—a cut which meant grievous reductions in hard-driven textile workers’ wages—another great strike began, with flying squadrons of strikers driving from mill town to mill town in the South, with National guardsmen called out in seven states, and with a list of dead and wounded growing ominously day by day. That fall General Johnson left the NRA under a storm of criticism—or, as he delicately put it himself, a “hail of dead cats.”

The AAA was a storm center too, and its effect upon the farmers’ income was a matter of dispute, since the rise in farm prices in 1934 might be partly attributed to the deadly drought which was blighting the prairies and the Great Plains. Unemployment and the resulting drain upon the national budget continued almost unabated.

Politically, the President came through the Congressional elections of 1934 with flying colors; the Democrats gained nine seats in the Senate and even enlarged slightly their big majority in the House.

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