FDR - Jean Edward Smith [206]
Although Louis often asked me to take him for a drive in the afternoon, I was rather surprised one day when he insisted that I drive him out to the veterans’ camp just off Potomac Drive. It did not take long to get there. When we arrived he announced he was going to sit in the car but that I was to walk around among the veterans and see just how things were. Very hesitatingly I got out and walked over to where I saw a line-up of men waiting for food. They looked at me curiously and one of them asked my name and what I wanted. When I said I just wanted to see how they were getting on, they asked me to join them.90
At first, the men could not believe the first lady was among them. Mrs. Roosevelt spent more than an hour at the camp. She sloshed through the mud, inspected mess facilities and living quarters, and reminisced about her experience in wartime Washington serving coffee, making sandwiches, and visiting the wounded. In the large convention tent she led the veterans in singing old Army songs and spoke briefly: “I never want to see another war. I would like to see fair consideration for everyone, and I shall always be grateful to those who served their country.”91
When Mrs. Roosevelt returned to her car, she found Louis Howe fast asleep. It was a boffo performance. “Hoover sent the Army,” said one veteran. “Roosevelt sent his wife.”92* Several days later the Bonus Army voted to disband. FDR waived the age rules (most of the veterans were in their forties), and some twenty-six hundred enlisted in the CCC. The remaining four hundred or so were given free rail transportation home.
The capstone of the one hundred days was the passage by Congress of the National Industrial Recovery Act on the last day of the session. The NIRA was the most inclusive, most ambitious legislation of the hundred days, yet, like FDR’s decision to go off gold, it was a response to circumstance. On April 6 the Senate, acting on its own initiative, passed a bill (53–30) introduced by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama that would bar from interstate commerce goods produced in plants where employees worked more than five days a week or six hours a day. By limiting the workweek to thirty hours, Black and his supporters claimed, the bill would create 6 million new jobs.
FDR was caught off guard. He believed the Black bill was unconstitutional,* that it was inflexible, and that it would retard recovery by forcing employers into a straitjacket.93 But with the vigorous support of organized labor, the bill appeared unstoppable. Rather than buck the tide, Roosevelt diverted the flow. Working with Moley, Frances Perkins, and Secretary of War Dern, he expanded the Black bill into an omnibus proposal governing the whole range of industrial recovery. On May 17 FDR sent a new bill to Congress that had something for everyone. Title I, based loosely on the experience of the War Industries Board during World War I, authorized business to establish production codes controlling prices and output in each industry, free from antitrust regulation. Section 7(a) of the bill, modeled on War Labor Board practices, guaranteed labor’s right to bargain collectively and stipulated that the industry codes should set minimum wages and maximum hours. Title II contained Roosevelt’s public works proposal, $3.3 billion in government spending parceled for the maximum legislative support.94 The House roared its approval, 325–76. The Senate was more narrowly divided. Progressives like Norris and La Follette objected to the blank check given business to set prices and production levels; conservatives like Carter Glass objected to the collective bargaining provisions for labor. But the center held, and as the clock ticked down on the closing minutes of the first session of the Seventy-third Congress, the Senate added its concurrence 46–39, 15 Democrats voting against.95
Earlier in the day Congress had enacted legislation establishing the Farm Credit Administration to consolidate agricultural credit