FDR - Jean Edward Smith [210]
* “This is not a Democratic bill and it is not a Republican bill,” said Mary Norton of New Jersey. “It is a bill to maintain the credit of the United States, and I shall support it.” The New York Times, March 12, 1933.
* The lame-duck Seventy-second Congress had voted on February 20, 1933, to repeal the Eighteenth (Prohibition) Amendment, but the proposal, which subsequently became the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, did not become effective until ratified by the thirty-sixth state (Utah) on December 5, 1933. Amending the Volstead Act provided interim relief.
* Roosevelt was true to his word. At the end of the session Time reported that of the hundred thousand appointments available, FDR had made only 272, all at the highest level. The remaining jobs were being held in limbo by Postmaster General James A. Farley—whom Time called the party’s chief patronage dispenser. Farley had a “white list” of Democrats who had consistently supported the president and a “sinners’ roll” of party members who had deserted on crucial roll calls. The constituents of those on the “sinners’ roll” could expect slim pickings. June 26, 1933.
* The processors eventually had their day in court and temporarily prevailed when the Supreme Court, speaking through Justice Owen Roberts, overturned the Agricultural Adjustment Act in United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936). The decision is well known to constitutional scholars for Roberts’s remarkable description of constitutional adjudication. The Court’s duty, as Roberts would have it, was simply “to lay the Article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged and to decide whether the latter squares with the former.” The decision in Butler was explicitly overruled in Mulford v. Smith, 307 U.S. 38 (1939), and Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942). Of more than passing interest, the decision in Mulford v. Smith reversing Butler was also written by Justice Roberts, who apparently found a new set of carpenter’s tools.
* After the economy measure was passed in March 1933, FDR and the Bureau of the Budget zeroed in on the Army to absorb a significant portion of the cuts. The 1934 military budget was to be slashed by $80 million, roughly 51 percent. But the necessity to get the CCC up and running placed a premium on military experience. Not only was the Army budget spared, but many reserve officers were recalled to active duty to manage the camps. William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 154–156 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Education of a General 276–280 (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
† In current dollars the $1.5 billion disbursed would amount to roughly $21 billion, given a conversion factor of 13.89.
* The act established the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, commonly known as the Public Works Administration, and on July 8, 1933, FDR appointed Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to be the administrator. Between July 1933 and March 1939, the PWA financed the construction of more than 34,000 projects at a cost of more than $6 billion. Projects ran the gamut from lighthouses and battleships to municipal sewer systems. Approximately 1.2 million men were employed on site under the program. The PWA was dissolved in June 1941. 2 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 270–271. For the Public Works Administration generally, see America Builds: The Record of the PWA (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939).
* Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
* Utility shareholders