National Recovery Administration (NRA), a federal agency created under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and abolished after the
Supreme Court held this act unconstitutional in 1935.The agency was modeled on the
War Industries Board (WIB), the
World War I agency that sought to promote industrial self‐government. A similar system, advocates claimed, could end the “destructive competition” allegedly perpetuating the Great Depression. In 1933, as part of his
New Deal, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt secured an emergency two‐year measure suspending the antitrust laws and authorizing government‐recognized industrial organizations to formulate a new regulatory system consisting of codes of fair competition and fair labor practices. Presidential approval made such codes federal law, and where no approvable codes were adopted by industrial sectors, federal authorities were authorized to impose them.
To administer the law, Roosevelt created the NRA under General Hugh Johnson, a former WIB member. A massive propaganda campaign followed, depicting support for the NRA's codes of fair competition as patriotic, and urging citizens to boycott businesses operating without the NRA's official Blue Eagle emblems. Eventually 541 codes were approved, each combining regulation of
business practice with a required guarantee of workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. Despite widespread noncompliance, codification did reduce competition, foster labor and business organization, and largely end
child labor. Yet such results failed to bring recovery, and owing to this failure a code structure disproportionately fashioned by big businessmen came under severe criticism from smaller businesses, labor, consumers, and political dissidents, many demanding extensive code revision. In 1934 a new administrative board replaced Johnson, but policy conflicts and deadlocks only worsened. By May 1935, when the Supreme Court ruled that the system involved both an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive branch and an unconstitutional expansion of the government's power to regulate commerce, it had few supporters left. The NRA that lingered on under a six‐months extension busied itself mostly with writing official histories of the codification experience.
Historians have generally regarded the NRA as a huge mistake, an unfortunate flirtation with
corporatism that, in effect, turned policy‐making over to big business with disastrous results. Recently, however, scholars have complicated the picture by using the history of the NRA to illuminate patterns of business organization and disorganization, federal administrative structures and incapacities, and liberal ideas concerning planning. Some have also shown that parts of the code structure reflected the demands of small and medium‐sized rather than big business. In addition, the historical significance of the NRA has become clearer, both as an example of failed corporatism in America and as an unsuccessful experiment that opened the way to more innovative reforms and the new regulatory agencies of the later New Deal.
See also
Depressions, Economic;
Economic Regulation.
Bibliography
Bernard Bellush , The Failure of the NRA, 1975.
Donald R. Brand , Corporatism and the Rule of Law: A Study of the National Recovery Administration, 1988.
Ellis W. Hawley
