RECOVERY: Eclipse

Last week General Hugh S. Johnson put into effect the Recovery Administration’s 288th code — a code for the Graphic Arts.

Four months ago that would have been front page news. Last week readers had to hunt hard through the inside of their papers to find any mention of it. Whereas four months ago any speech by General Johnson, wherever delivered, made headlines throughout the U. S., today his words hardly make local headlines. Blue Eagles, posted up so proudly in shop windows last summer, are now faded and half-forgotten. Because “everybody” is supposed to be under a code, retail consumers no longer consciously pick and choose their stores.

Reasons for this sharp drop in public interest in NRA were plentiful. General Johnson has ceased giving daily dramatic performances in Washington. Normal working hours have softened his temper and his tongue. There are no more tycoons to be battled. The battalions of NRA propagandists have been disbanded. National code-making has almost petered out. Last week it was announced that barber shops, laundries, building managements, restaurants and local transportation would be encouraged to form their regional codes. Biggest NRA project afoot was not the making of codes, but a big meeting in Washington to air code criticisms, suggest revisions.

More serious than the eclipse of NRA was the widespread belief that NRA had fallen far short of its ballyhooed objectives, had, in fact, been a failure by the standards set up by its own sponsors. The Chicago Daily News last week featured the charge of failure in a front page editorial on “the practical collapse of NRA as a Universal Panacea for industrial depression.” Three prime reasons were advanced: 1) NRA is legally beaten, a premature claim. For six months the Federal Government has artfully dodged any such ordeal by law. The only immediate test in sight resulted from a decision by a Federal court in Texas exempting local oil producers, not signers of the oil code, from code supervision because they were not engaged in interstate commerce. The oil code is, however, a specialized case which chiefly concerns not General Johnson but Secretary Ickes who last week promised a swift appeal to the Supreme Court. 2) NRA was supposed, by limiting hours of work per man, to cure unemployment and prevent a dole but has not. Despite all General Johnson’s claims last autumn of the millions and millions of men put to work by NRA, unemployment has remained a big problem all winter, is still waiting solution. The last A. F. of L. unemployment figures stood at 7,000,000. To this must be added the 4,000,000 CWA workers who, except for government bounty, would also be idle. 3) NRA was supposed by raising wages to increase the purchasing power of the U. S. but did not. The cost of living has risen as well as the payrolls of industry so that industrial wage earners cannot buy appreciably more goods than they did before NRA.

Many an observer saw another reason for NRA’s eclipse: Because of NRA’s comparative failure to attain the two main results at which it was aimed the Administration has been glad to let it be forgotten, to shift public attention on other programs that may possibly achieve better results.