INDUSTRY: Hot Applications

By last week the National Recovery Administration figured it had placed some 9,000,000 workers under work & wage codes signed by 1,000,000 employers. This showing, however, did not satisfy Recovery Administrator Hugh Samuel Johnson. Heavy industries (steel, automobiles, oil, coal) were harder to codify than expected. Re-employment figures did not seem to be keeping pace with the spread of the Blue Eagle. There was more & more talk about “chiselers.” Said General Johnson: “We haven’t started to apply the heat on this thing yet. This isn’t a campaign of a week or a month. It’s a drive we’re going to keep up until the last employer has signed up.”

Ways & means of “applying the heat” to the NRA campaign began to crop up in the news. At Hyde Park President Roosevelt issued an executive order which permitted cancellation of all government contracts with non-NRA manufacturers. In Manhattan Postmaster General Farley talked of prosecuting violators of NRA agreements under the postal fraud statute. In Washington Relief Administrator Harry Lloyd Hopkins announced that the Blue Eagle would get all his spending money. The boycott raised its menacing head when General Johnson inaugurated a “Buy Now” campaign with the buying to be done exclusively from NRA members. To a Baltimore utility company which claimed NRA exemption on the ground it did no interstate business, the General declared: “The Blue Eagle doesn’t know anything about interstate and intrastate commerce. It can’t see a State line.”* Sternly he warned all NRA code violators: “The time is coming when somebody is going to take one of these Blue Eagles off someone’s window and that’s going to be a sentence of economic death.”

These rumbling threats from NRA headquarters were matched in spirit by the organizing of 15,000 women to be turned loose on the land as NRA crusaders. In charge of this female army to “ferret out drones” was Miss Mary Hughes, Louisville, Ky. promoter. Already complaints were reaching General Johnson of the terrifying effects of mass emotion stirred up in small towns by impassioned NRA crusaders. The campaign was rapidly passing from a volunteer to a conscription basis.

After two months of the hardest, most spectacular work, General Johnson was beginning to get his second wind. His health was a matter of national concern; if he cracked, the whole NRA campaign might go under. His eyes were swollen from lack of sleep. Flashlamps were making him flinch. His temper was running short. President Roosevelt had to command him to get a night’s sleep when he flew to Hyde Park fortnight ago (TIME, August 14). Even the fatherly New York Times last week advised him to “ease up a bit.”

His best ally was the daily press. The nation’s front page was his every time he opened his mouth. His salty speech, his candor, his humor, his drive captivated the half a hundred Washington correspondents who attended his conferences. The General roughly rejected the proposed newspaper code as unsatisfactory (see p. 28) but publishers did not retaliate by playing him down.

The most frequent and familiar cry heard in the Johnson office in the Department of Commerce building is “Robbie!” At the General’s loud call up steps a small, pert young woman of 27 named Frances Robinson. She is his secretary and shadow. She runs his tumultuous office. She flies with him on his missions about the country. She hovers over him at all press conferences. She is a NRA power.

General Johnson picked “Robbie” from last year’s Democratic campaign headquarters. She is a self-made girl, aggressive, shrewd, able. She wears smart clothes, smokes in the corridors, bawls out office boys in a shrill voice. She conceals her past for fear alleged relatives will try to borrow from her. She winks at her friends, ignores strangers about the office. As a matter of business newsmen play up to her, get their neckties straightened and handkerchiefs adjusted in return. Says Secretary Robinson: “It’s wonderful to meet all the great men of the country. I’m getting a great kick out of it. But after all this is just another job to me.”

Also working with General Johnson are his wife and their son Kilbourne. The latter, a 26-year-old graduate West Pointer on leave from the Army, spells his name Johnston. His father dropped the “t” years ago. As an investigator in NRA’s legal department Son Kilbourne dashes around with his father’s zip but not his thunder.*

Tired of hotel life Mrs. Johnson took a non-paying job on NRA’s Consumers Advisory Board, chairmanned by Mrs. Charles Gary Rumsey. A quiet, cheery, unassuming person in simple clothes, the General’s wife works in the complaint division sits in on many a code hearing.

Last week Mrs. Rumsey’s Consumer’s Board was revealed as a battlefield in which a clash of ideas had virtually stalemated its activities. Though Mrs. Rumsey was the daughter of the late great Railroader Edward Henry Harriman and founded the socialite Junior League, she is no conservative social idler. An ardent liberal with Democratic leanings, she believes in a co-operative commonwealth and the utmost protection for consumers against industrial profiteering. To her board was appointed Professor William Fielding Ogburn, University of Chicago sociologist who worked on Herbert Hoover’s mammoth social trends survey. When the board commenced computing costs of living and methods of keeping it down, Mrs. Rumsey and Professor Ogburn found themselves at sword’s point. Mrs. Rumsey thought Professor Ogburn was too inclined to favor Industry. Professor Ogburn thought Mrs. Rumsey’s anti-profiteering plans were too spectacular. After fruitless weeks of bickering, Mrs. Rumsey went to General Johnson, asked to have Professor Ogburn removed from the board. In Chicago the economist got a telegram telling him he had been transferred to another job which later turned out to be nonexistent. He raced back to Washington to fight for his old position, decided to resign instead. He bitterly complained of Mrs. Rumsey’s amateur methods and personnel, obliquely flayed the appointment of Mrs. Johnson to handle consumers’ grievances. Meanwhile Mrs. Rumsey had suffered a nervous collapse, gone off to Newport to recover.

*Last week the light & power industry went under a temporary NRA code offered by Edison Electric Institute pending approval of a permanent trade agreement. *Other able sons of able fathers in NRA: John Swope, 25, son of General Electric’s Gerard Swope. at work on NRA advertising; Robert Kenneth Straus, 28, son of Ambassador Jesse Isidor Straus, secretary to NRA’s policy board.