by Adam Cohen
The money and work experience changed millions of lives. The CCC allowed Robert Shaver, a young man with a sixth-grade education assigned to a camp in Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest, to send $25 a month to his struggling parents back in Cedar Rapids. Louis I. Schneider’s father was unemployed and unable to support his twelve children. Schneider worked at a CCC camp in Cascade, Iowa, so his siblings would be able to eat and stay in school. At a time when there were few ways for young people to learn basic job skills, the CCC was an invaluable training ground. Charles Krall, who took conservation courses while he worked at a camp in Montana, went on to a thirty-year career in the Soil Conservation Service. Joseph Aebisher, a New Yorker assigned to a Vermont camp, helped build a ski jump in Stowe and a picnic area near Rutland. When his service was over, he became a construction engineer in the army. The CCC, he later said, “gave me the job experience that I’ve built on during the rest of my life.”66
At first, the CCC was limited to unmarried men. Eleanor Roosevelt suggested to Perkins that women should be allowed to sign up. On June 1, the two women jointly announced the opening of an experimental camp for three hundred young women in upstate New York, on the banks of the Hudson River. Rather than plant trees or build roads, the women would receive vocational training in dressmaking, weaving, and embroidering. Later, at a camp in Texas, women would undertake the more rugged work of building vacation cottages, but overall, the opportunities for women were limited. The CCC was not much more receptive to blacks, despite Oscar DePriest’s antidiscrimination amendment. In both the South and North, blacks were not allowed to sign up in proportion to their numbers, and they were generally placed in segregated camps. In camps for black workers, the supervisory positions went to whites. Fechner, who was a Southerner, defended the discriminatory policies, insisting that whites in the surrounding communities would feel more secure having whites in charge of the camps. Native Americans had a surprisingly good experience. In April, Roosevelt opened the CCC to 14,400 tribal members, who were suffering from the effects of both the Depression and a serious drought. There were CCC operations on reservations in fifteen southwestern and western states. Many of the projects, which were chosen with input from the tribal councils, focused on combating soil erosion and insect infestations, both of which were having a devastating impact on Native American farming.67
Veterans ended up receiving special status in the CCC, thanks to the Bonus Army. A year had passed since the Bonus Army’s bloody encounter with Hoover’s troops. The army’s leaders had decided to return to Washington to keep lobbying for immediate payment of their bonuses and to protest the deep cuts that Lewis Douglas was making to their benefits. Roosevelt took a different approach from Hoover’s. He was as resolute as his predecessor had been about not paying out the bonus, which would have interfered with his government economy plans. But he did not want to be drawn into the sort of clashes that had done Hoover’s reputation so much harm. Roosevelt invited the veterans to camp at Fort Hunt, an old army instillation on the Potomac River. The government would provide them with meals, medical care, and entertainment by the navy band.68
About three thousand Bonus Army members showed up, far fewer than the twenty thousand who had come a year earlier. As they settled in, Louis Howe had an idea. One afternoon, he asked Eleanor to take a drive with him. When they approached Fort Hunt, he asked her to go out and meet with the veterans. “Get their gripes, if any, make a tour of the camp and tell them that Franklin sent you to see about them,” Howe instructed. “Don’t forget that—be sure to tell them that Franklin sent you out to see about them.” Eleanor threw herself into the camp, drinking coffee with the men, recounting her visits to the European battlefronts during the World War, and leading the veterans in old army songs. She did not know what would happen to their bonus, she told them, but she declared, “I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country.” The veterans were moved that a first lady had come to see them, and had treated them with respect and humanity. “Hoover sent the Army,” one veteran said. “Roosevelt sent his wife.”69
Even after the visit, Roosevelt held firm on the bonus, which disappointed veterans and their supporters. The veterans had “fought for democracy and you got influenza, prohibition, and Hoover,” Francis Shoemaker, a Farmer-Labor member of Congress from Minnesota, told the Bonus Army. “Now you have a new deal, a raw deal I call it.” What Roosevelt did offer the men was a special path to signing up for the CCC. He issued an executive order setting aside 25,000 places for veterans of the World War and the Spanish-American War, and all Bonus Army members encamped at Fort Hunt would be guaranteed spots. Some members of the Bonus Army refused to give up their goal of getting the bonus paid, and their responses were in some cases indignant. A loud cheer went up at Fort Hunt when one army member cried out, “To hell with reforestation!” Maurice Miller, one of the leaders, told a reporter that “none of the men are going to do any work like that for $1 a day.” Many of the rank and file, however, felt differently. Within days of Roosevelt’s offer, the Bonus Army disbanded. More than 2,500 of its members joined the CCC, and those who chose not to were given free transportation home. Fort Hunt was transformed into a CCC camp.70
As soon as the Black Bill began moving in Congress, the administration began scrambling to develop its own plan for industrial recovery. The main idea that was emerging was that the federal government and businesses should work together to coordinate industrial activity. Moley and Tugwell had favored some form of business-government partnership since the Brain Trust days. Their bible was Concentration and Control, a 1912 book by University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise, which argued that the United States had entered a post-competitive age, in which companies were growing larger and industries were becoming more “concentrated.” Van Hise insisted that there was nothing wrong with industrial concentration as long as there was corresponding “control” by government regulators. This approach was a sharp break from the previous generation of progressives, who had rallied to Louis Brandeis’s warnings about the “curse of bigness” and his call for breaking up large corporations through vigorous antitrust laws. The Brain Trust believed, in Moley’s words, “that economic bigness was here to stay” and that “it was the duty of government to devise, with business, the means of social and individual adjustment to the facts of the industrial age.”71
Moley and Tugwell supported industrial planning for different reasons. Tugwell, one of the administration’s most liberal members, had been greatly influenced by the two months he had spent in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1927, when it was about to embark on its first Five Year Plan. New Deal critics would later charge that he had become a Marxist on the trip. Tugwell scoffed at the charge—“as though,” he would later say, “communism could be caught by contagion like mumps or measles.” He was not a Communist, but the Soviet influence on his thinking was noticeable. He believed that the United States could benefit from greater centralized economic planning. He also argued that “profits must be limited and their uses controlled.”72
Moley, who had grown increasingly close with business leaders, came to the issue from the opposite direction. He was interested not in limiting corporate profits, but in expanding them, and promoting “business confidence.” Economic conditions were so desperate that big business was eager for government planning. The same industrial leaders who extolled laissez-faire in the 1920s were now pleading with the government to step in. They argued that unfair competition had driven prices so low that they could not operate. Business leaders supported a law that would authorize the government to convene meetings of each industry at which mandatory minimum prices would be set. If companies sold their goods below these prices, they would be fined or shut down. Meetings of this kind would require suspending the antitrust laws, something business had been seeking since they were adopted. When 1,400 corporate leaders gathered in Washington for the United States Chamber of Comme
rce’s annual meeting in the first week in May, most of the speakers called for greater government control over industry. “We have failed to take the necessary steps voluntarily, so the element of force, government compulsion, becomes necessary,” Paul W. Litchfield, president of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., told the group.73
Perkins did not support centralized industrial planning, and she was wary of proposals to relax the antitrust laws. The New Dealers fell into two camps, the “collectivists” like Tugwell and Moley, who wanted to create a big centralized structure to run industry, and the old-line “progressives” like Perkins, who believed in competition and trust-busting. Tugwell lamented that Perkins was “inclined to regard with Brandeis-like disapproval bigness of any sort and especially in government.” Perkins would not actively oppose a program of industrial planning, but neither would she fight for one. What she cared about was using whatever industrial relief bill emerged to enact workers’ rights protections. The probusiness Supreme Court had repeatedly held workers’ rights laws unconstitutional, in cases like Lochner v. New York, which struck down a state maximum hours law for bakers, and Hammer v. Dagenhart, which invalidated a federal ban on products made with child labor. Given the court’s hostility, Perkins thought the best way of establishing minimum wages, maximum hours, and a ban on child labor was to get businesses to agree to them voluntarily, which they might do in exchange for greater freedom to meet to agree on pricing. Most of all, Perkins was intent on seeing that the bill included public works. “I don’t care about what they do about anything else,” she said. “Let them do anything else they want to try—just so we get a public works program.”74
Roosevelt’s views on industrial policy were something of a riddle, as so many of his views were, but they appeared to be closer to Moley’s and Tugwell’s than to Perkins’s. Roosevelt had never been a Brandeisian-style trust-buster. As early as 1912, in a speech in Troy, New York, he had argued that collective industrial action could promote the public interest more than competition. “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point,” he said, “but co-operation, which is the thing that we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.” Roosevelt had also served, before he was governor, as head of the American Construction Council, a trade association. The industrial planners wanted to give organizations like the construction council greater authority to coordinate action among their members to boost profits and promote recovery. In the 1932 campaign, Roosevelt signaled that he would back some form of government-industry coordination. In his speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on progressive government, he had declared that “business men everywhere are asking for a form of organization which will bring the scheme of things into balance”—an apparent reference to industrial planning.”75
On April 14, Arthur Krock reported in The New York Times that a plan that would combine industrial relief and public works was “being developed by the President’s closest advisors.” In fact, more than one industrial relief plan was being developed. Roosevelt had asked Moley to begin work on a bill. Moley had asked James Warburg, the young banker who had been advising the administration, to look through a stack of industrial recovery plans that had been piling up in his office and make a recommendation for how to proceed. After reviewing the plans and speaking with economic experts, Warburg came up with an elaborate scheme in which the federal government would guarantee industry’s losses for a period of time, and share in any gains. Although Warburg was conservative, his plan for the “regimentation” of industry was complicated, intrusive, and likely to cost a great deal. Moley talked it over with Roosevelt, and they agreed not to pursue it.76
Moley got a second draft bill started when he bumped into Hugh Johnson, Bernard Baruch and George Peek’s associate, in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel. “I fell into his arms and told him the whole sad story of my failure to deliver” with Warburg’s draft, Moley later recalled. During the World War, Johnson had worked for the War Industries Board, which Baruch had headed. The board had stimulated wartime production by relaxing antitrust rules, which freed businesses to set their own production levels and prices. Moley thought that the War Industries Board was a good model for the industrial program he and Roosevelt had in mind. When Johnson agreed to try to draft a bill, Moley took him back to his own office, “routed someone out of a desk,” and put him to work.77
Johnson, who had spent years in the orbit of the business-minded Baruch, saw the industrial crisis the way the leaders of industry did. He believed the main problem was irresponsible companies engaging in “cut-throat” competition, driving down prices and making it impossible for legitimate businesses to make a profit. The plan that Johnson drew up gave business leaders what they wanted—less competition. It suspended the antitrust laws, and it allowed companies in a trade association to work together—critics would say collude—to draw up codes of “fair competition.” The codes, which would be legally binding if the president approved them, set limits on the hours factories operated and how much they produced. They also set minimum prices, to eliminate cutthroat competition. Companies that failed to comply with the codes could be shut down. Johnson consulted with Tugwell on the bill, and Donald Richberg, a union lawyer who worked on the landmark Railway Labor Act of 1926, helped with the drafting.78
Two other groups were drafting industrial recovery bills at the same time, a reflection of the administration’s disorganized habits during the Hundred Days. Assistant Commerce Secretary John Dickinson, a onetime University of Pennsylvania law professor, was coordinating an administration team that included Perkins, Tugwell, and Ickes. Tugwell was promoting a tax on industries much like the tax on processors in the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which would be distributed as an incentive to companies that adhered to the codes. The third group, led by Senator Wagner, started meeting on April 25. The Wagner team was working from a plan for recovery promoted by Brookings Institution economist Harold Moulton, former congressman Meyer Jacobstein, and banker Fred Kent, which called for suspending the antitrust laws and allowing trade associations to work cooperatively to reduce competition and raise prices and wages. The Dickinson and Wagner groups, which had similar approaches, quickly joined forces.79
Throughout the drafting, Perkins focused on her issues. The Johnson plan included only a brief mention of public works, which would not be enough to get the sort of program started that she favored. Perkins recalled that when she joined the discussion Wagner’s draft also did not contain any kind of public works provision. Although he was one of the biggest supporters of public works in Congress, Wagner apparently intended to keep public works in a separate bill. Perkins urged both groups to add large-scale public works provisions. She was intent, she later said, on seeing that “public works was not lost in the enthusiasm for what I still regarded as a somewhat exotic and thoroughly experimental scheme.”80
Perkins’s other preoccupation was ensuring that the bill contained strong workers’ rights protections. It was, she realized, a rare opportunity. In the two decades she had been fighting for minimum wage and maximum hours laws, she had always come up against strong opposition from employers. Now, companies were in such a weakened state, and they were so desperate to be able to collude to prop up prices, industry leaders might be willing to make substantial concessions to workers in exchange. Wagner, who was one of organized labor’s most reliable allies in Congress, did not require much convincing to include workers’ rights in his draft. He had been working on his own with labor economists to see what the unions wanted in the bill. Perkins invited Johnson, who was less attuned to labor issues, to dine with her and Mary Rumsey in their Georgetown home. Over the course of several dinners, Perkins made her pitch. At this point, the drafting was still going on in secret. Perkins told William Green about the bill, and asked him what the AFL would want to see in it. Green said that organized labor’s highest priority was establishing a right to organize workers who were not yet in a union. Perkins would later say that she h
ad not seen the importance of the right to organize because it was so well established in New York. In the rest of the country, though, unions were met with hostile, and often violent, responses when they launched an organizing drive. Perkins agreed to support adding the right to organize to the bill.81
In order to include a large-scale public works provision in the bill, the progressives would have to overcome Lewis Douglas’s opposition. When Perkins brought public works up at Cabinet meetings, Douglas used what she regarded as an underhanded tactic. He would say that it sounded like a valuable idea, worthy of further investigation, and that he would be happy to look into it. Instead of telling Roosevelt “ ‘I will oppose it to the last breath of my body,’ which would have been the truth,” Perkins complained, “he would always say, ‘I will look that up, Mr. President. I would like to have that considered by two or three of my men. I will give you a report on that.’ ” Perkins “knew the trick,” she said, his strategy of blocking a program he opposed with “fine words and plausible and apparently cooperative statements.” Having preempted the discussion at the Cabinet meeting, Douglas could then give his report to Roosevelt one-on-one, where he could raise his concerns without fear of contradiction. “Part of his reason for backing away from cabinet discussion,” Perkins realized, “was that he could do better in private.”82