FDR - Jean Edward Smith [218]
The failure of the Public Works Administration to provide economic stimulus doomed NRA’s recovery efforts from the start. Without a significant infusion of construction money, the NRA could not expand the economy. Johnson labored mightily to create industry codes that would control production, fix prices, and regulate working conditions. But without money to prime the pump, he was simply redistributing scarcity. When that became apparent, the brief spurt of popularity NRA enjoyed evaporated. Enforcing industry codes became impossible, and in early 1935 the Supreme Court administered the coup de grâce when it struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act as unconstitutional.43 Chief Justice Hughes, speaking for a unanimous Court, held that the code-making authority given to the president constituted an impermissible delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. In a concurring opinion, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, normally in sympathy with the New Deal, called the NIRA “delegation running riot.”44 FDR soon castigated the horse-and-buggy mentality of the Court, and its decision to overturn the NIRA later contributed to his desire to restructure the judicial branch.45 But the day the decision came down, Roosevelt was relieved.* The Court had bailed him out of a program that was increasingly unpopular and unsuccessful. “You know the whole thing has been a mess,” FDR told Frances Perkins.
“It has been an awful headache,” said Roosevelt. “Some of the things they have done in NRA are pretty wrong.… I don’t want to impose a system on this country that will set aside the anti-trust laws on any permanent basis. So let’s give the NRA a certain amount of time to liquidate. Have a history of it written, and then it will be over.”46
As the winter of 1933–34 approached, Roosevelt recognized that Ickes’s caution in spending PWA money was creating few jobs and doing little to ease the suffering of the destitute. Faced with the critical need to tide people over the winter, FDR turned to Hopkins. Could he provide temporary jobs for 4 million people? Hopkins said he could if he had the money. Roosevelt mentally computed the cost—he assumed it would require an additional $400 million—and decided to tap Ickes’s underused Public Works budget for the funds. He delegated Hopkins, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace to break the news to Ickes and on November 9, 1933, issued an executive order establishing the Civil Works Administration with Hopkins as director.47
As Roosevelt anticipated, Hopkins moved quickly. He shifted staff from FERA to the CWA, raided Army warehouses for tools and equipment, and dragooned the Veterans Administration—the one federal agency with a national disbursement system in place—into becoming the CWA’s paymaster.48 Unlike relief programs, the Civil Works Administration provided jobs. Within ten days Hopkins had put more than 800,000 people to work, 2.6 million by mid-December, and by early January he was well over the 4 million mark. The CWA paid the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled labor, and the work was seasonal. When it went out of existence in April 1934, the CWA had pumped close to $1 billion into the ailing economy. Eighty percent of that had gone directly into workers’ wages, with the bulk of the remainder paid out for equipment and material.49 Less than 2 percent went for administrative overhead— another Hopkins hallmark.
In the bitter winter of 1933–34, with record low temperatures gripping the nation, the CWA laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or upgraded 500,000 miles of secondary roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 recreation areas, and nearly a thousand airports. It employed 50,000 teachers to keep rural schools open and to provide adult education in