RECOVERY: Monolith Into Pyramid

Newshawks at Hyde Park last week got nothing more than what they had been expecting for weeks when the President’s secretariat handed them two mimeographed sheets of paper. One sheet read:

“Dear Mr. President:

“The reorganization of NRA, which has been the subject of so many conferences and memoranda between us, is becoming momentarily more urgent. We are in agreement upon the general form of reorganization and I do hope you will see eye-to-eye with me on the subject of my resigning from a job which, as reorganized, seems altogether superfluous. . . .

“Sincerely,

“HUGH S. JOHNSON.”

In a warm and friendly reply to “Dear Hugh,” the President accepted Administrator Johnson’s resignation effective Oct. 15 “because you and I have felt for some time that NRA has fulfilled its first phase.”

Two days later in Washington President Roosevelt inducted NRA into its second phase. For its first 15 months of life NRA’s executive structure had been monolithic, with Hugh Samuel Johnson as the bottom, top and sides. The structure of NRA’s administration was now changed to a pyramid. Broad base was a seven-man board which would carry on the routine duties of code administration. No sooner had these seven members been appointed than statisticians found that four were lawyers, five were in Who’s Who, three were economists, two had Phi Beta Kappa keys, two had been bankers, two were tycoons. The oldest was 55, the youngest 28. Most of the members of the new National Industrial Recovery Board were NRA alumni.

Board’s baby was NRA’s associate counsel, Blackwell Smith, Manhattan lawyer. Board’s oldster was Leon Carroll Marshall, a Johns Hopkins law professor who had served on the National Labor Board and been one of NRA’s assistant administrators. President Arthur Dare Whiteside of Dun & Bradstreet had served the Blue Eagle as a division administrator. Sidney Hillman, president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, had been on the Labor Advisory Board. From the Consumers Advisory Board came Walton Hale Hamilton, professor of political economy. Economic adviser was Leon Henderson of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Chosen chairman of the National Industrial Recovery Board was its seventh member—Samuel Clay Williams. (So hurriedly had the board been recruited that when their first meeting was called to elect the chairman, Messrs. Williams, Hamilton and Whiteside had to cast their votes by long distance telephone.) Last spring Mr. Williams retired as president of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. (Camels) to become an industrial member of the National Labor Board and, later, head of the Advisory & Planning Council. A big man with a soft North Carolina drawl and the best business manners in his State, Mr. Williams took his law degree at the University of Virginia in 1908. Like 50 others, he has been made a millionaire by the Reynolds Co. Not a great tobacco buyer or seller, he is known as a great tobacco lawyer.

As yet unnamed was the personnel of the pyramid’s central section, the judicial committee which will some day have to fight the Blue Eagle’s battles before the Supreme Court.

Above that committee rose a superstructure called the Industrial Emergency Committee, NRA’s CHQ, on which will sit Secretaries Perkins & Ickes, NRA Board Chairman Williams, AAAdministrator Davis, FERAdministrator Hopkins. Capstone of the entire organization was the Director of the Industrial Emergency Committee, Donald Randall Richberg, NRA’s general counsel (TIME, Sept. 10). No longer will NRA be a one-man organization, but Director Richberg becomes the second biggest official in the Government. The antithesis of his onetime bosom friend Hugh Johnson, he tried to soothe Business, which cocked an alarmed eye at his radical past, with promises of “no sudden or sweeping changes in policy . . . everyone will be given a chance to be heard. . . .” But Business still feared that, unlike General Johnson, Chairman Richberg’s bite might be worse than his bark. His first job will be to frame legislation for Congress so that NRA’s reorganization may be made legal, its life extended beyond June 15,1935.

Meanwhile General Johnson, already absent six weeks from his desk on vacation, dropped completely out of sight somewhere in Manhattan. “Private considerations,” the General had explained in his letter of resignation, “are becoming more and more poignant.” To relieve their poignancy, the tousle-headed cavalryman, never a rich man, had turned to the means he used as a penniless lieutenant to make a bit of side money. In his youth he had written Williams of West Point and Williams on Service for boys. Now he was supposed to be sequestered in a Manhattan office rushing to completion a book about himself and NRA. Reputedly, his publishers were paying him the highest word rate ever given a former public official for his memoirs, not excepting Calvin Coolidge.

The money would come in handy, but Hugh Samuel Johnson needed no literary monument. For more than a year he had lived and breathed on the front page of the U. S. Press. He had given the country a magnificent show. Thousands of his fellow citizens of hundreds of cities remember nights when he roared up to their auditoriums behind snorting motorcycle police escorts, mounted the rostrum to exhort them, flatter them, curse them into embracing his Blue Eagle. Like another great Johnson, he enriched the language with at least three phrases: chiseler, crackdown, dead cats. He was big, he was vital, he was profane. He was 1933’s Man of the Year (TIME, Jan. 1).

Most just estimate of the General’s meteoric public career was that he made the best of a bad job. As an emergency method, he tried to put the industrial cart before the horse, make higher wages and shorter hours before manufacturing profits were at hand. In that he failed. Perhaps suave Mr. Richberg can do better. But history will credit General Johnson with three single-handed achievements: he swept child labor out of the land: he established as a national principle the minimum wage; he vastly strengthened collective bargaining in industry.

One of General Johnson’s greatest services to the President was as a buffer for criticism. Even as he was bowing out of the picture, his enemies—and he had many —took many a resentful parting shot. “It ought to have happened nine months ago!” cried North Dakota’s Senator Nye, who had quarreled with the General about NRA hardships on small businessmen. “Military man that he was,” grumbled old Clarence Darrow, whose three NRA reports marked the start of the reorganization movement, “he went at it like an Army mule driver and when he reached the end of his rope and he realized that the people were about to rise in revolt, he resigned. A very shrewd man!” Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, the Pennsylvania Governor’s lady who thought of General Johnson as a Wall Street strikebreaker, crowed: “I told you so.”

But on the whole the national attitude toward General Johnson was that of a football crowd which sees a game but groggy player finally sent to the showers long after he should have been taken out of play. “He did the job,” said the New York Herald Tribune. “Patriotic and gallant, but allied with a hopeless cause,” said the Baltimore Sun. “No one could have tried harder,” concluded the Chicago Tribune which hated him. In Los Angeles, the Times gave full credit for “good intentions.” The Kansas City Star lamented his departure on the grounds that, while he was “a great showman,” he was also a valuable conservative influence in the Administration.

Suddenly emerging from hiding, General Johnson appeared at NRA headquarters, called all hands into the auditorium. Quoting freely from the classics, the Bible and the remount depot, the voluble warrior urged his followers not to resign through “sentimental foolishness,” thanked them for their devotion. Said he: “I predicted this end from the very beginning. Red fire at first, dead cats and oblivion at the end.” There was not a dry eye in the house, including the General’s when he concluded: “Goodby. God bless you.”