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By Root 2037 0

non-political and part political. I found that was impossible, at least for me. I finally realized there was nothing for it but to be all political.”96 Republicans complained that the WPA was a gigantic patronage boondoggle operated for the benefit of the Democratic party.97 Critics on the left, led by The Nation, bellyached the WPA was a misguided attempt to aid America’s “crippled capitalist system” by forcing workers to settle for “depressed wages in a federal work gang.”98 Conservative southerners bridled at what they perceived to be the breakdown of white supremacy and a mixing of the races in various WPA programs. Hopkins, whom Joseph E. Davies once described as a combination of Saint Francis of Assisi and a racetrack tout, took the criticism as a badge of honor.99 “I haven’t a thing to apologize about,” he told an audience in Los Angeles. “If we have made mistakes we have made them in the interests of the people that were broke.”100

The two final accomplishments of the New Deal in 1935 were the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration and the passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. FDR established the REA by executive order on May 11, 1935.101 Nothing has done more to eliminate rural poverty than bringing electricity to the countryside. In 1935 only 11 percent of American farms had electricity; in Mississippi, less than 1 percent. Under REA, nonprofit rural cooperatives were organized to build power lines and distribute electricity, financed by long-term federal loans at low (3 percent) interest rates. In the South, power came primarily from the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the Northwest, from Bonneville and Grand Coulee; from Boulder (Hoover) Dam on the Colorado and Fort Peck on the Missouri. By the end of 1941, almost 50 percent of the nation’s farms had been electrified. World War II interrupted the construction of power lines for four years, but by the end of the 1940s there was virtually no farm without electricity.* Families that had lit their homes with coal oil lamps; families who had no washing machines, refrigerators, or vacuum cleaners; dairy farms that milked by hand—all now shared the growing prosperity of a modernizing America. With the possible exception of the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, no single action by the New Deal had a greater impact on daily life in the American countryside than rural electrification.102

FDR was the prime mover behind rural electrification. The Wagner Labor Relations Act, which recognized the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, owed its passage almost entirely to the unstinting efforts of Senator Robert Wagner of New York. In the early days of the New Deal, Roosevelt saw himself as a neutral arbiter between labor and management. He shied away from endorsing legislation that would enshrine collective bargaining and in fact had prevailed upon Wagner not to introduce his bill before the 1934 elections. But when the Seventy-fourth Congress convened, Wagner was quick off the mark pressing labor’s right to organize and the establishment of a National Labor Relations Board to guarantee it. Reflecting his German trade union heritage (Wagner’s father had been a printer in Wiesbaden), Wagner was one of the few Democrats who identified with the union movement. His long legislative career, in both Albany and Washington, had been dedicated to supporting labor’s cause. In the Senate he acquired a reputation as a peerless legislative craftsman, and unlike many other progressives he did not bloviate at the drop of a hat. Wagner played by the rules of the Senate club and was respected by his colleagues for it. By 1935 he was recognized as the Senate’s resident expert on labor matters. After lengthy hearings in March and April in which industry spokesmen lambasted the bill (even the columnist Walter Lippmann called it “one of the most reactionary measures of our time”), the Senate Labor Committee reported it unanimously on May 2.103 Two weeks later, after only two days of debate, the Senate added its approval 63–12, with four