Dying Eagle

By last week General Hugh S. Johnson was well launched in print on the series of articles he started to write for the Saturday Evening Post the moment President Roosevelt accepted his resignation as NRAdministrator. In an impatient opening salvo last fortnight the redoubtable General raked the whole New Deal front, advising President Roosevelt to alter or reverse his fiscal, monetary, tax, labor, industrial, relief, agricultural, foreign trade and recovery policies. "I firmly believe" wrote he, "that, if steps were taken tomorrow to put the monetary and borrowing policy of the Federal Government beyond the shadow of doubt, this depression would be relegated to the limbo of forgotten things in three months' time."

Last week its onetime Adminstrator got down to NRA proper in the first of a series of seven articles titled "The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth." His thesis: "I think that NRA has been put to sleep, that the Codes are being allowed to languish, that the Blue Eagle, without which it cannot live, is dying, that the principles on which the whole plan proceeded are being ignored, and, worst of all, that control of its policies is passing to people who opposed them from the beginning."

For the most part Author Johnson confined himself to justifying NRA's creation by a temperate statement of orthodox Roosevelt economic theory, such as any sympathetic professor might have written. Only when he came to answering attacks on NRA price control features and monopolistic tendencies did the General burst into genuine Johnsonese. Excerpt:

"Of course, price control can be used as a weapon of monopoly. It has frequently been so used, and that use of it was the very reason for the Antitrust Acts themselves. But that was price control downward in an effort to destroy competition. . . . NRA price stabilizations were all for exactly the reverse purpose--to prevent cut-throat and monopolistic price slashing, to maintain small industry, to continue employment, to abolish economic murder. . . .

"There is a school--I had, inaccurately, almost said 'of thought,'--in NRA that has prevailed since I left it which insists that any provision against predatory price slashing is 'economically unsound' and 'unenforceable and 'rendered unnecessary by the wage-fixing rules.' I fear that they have prevailed and that new NRA legislation proposed by the Administration will follow this so-called view. It is a ghastly paradox and I will fight it with all that I have to give. Here we have self-styled reformers echoing the shibboleth of some of the most reactionary influences in this country. It is a shivering inconsistency, explicable only by the almost bucolic innocence of practical business experience in its proponents and chief champions. Of course it is espoused by those of NRA who represent the most predatory of interests. For reasons already stated, if this academic fatuity is to prevail, NRA should be folded up and put away in lavender or--better and far different-- set to guard the harem of rapacity incarnate. It will have been completely emasculated."

General Johnson's thrusts were apparently aimed straight at NIRA's Chairman S. Clay Williams who last fortnight told 2,000 businessmen in Washington that NRA was now out to end code price control. Said Mr. Williams then: "Greater productivity and employment would result if greater price flexibility were attained." Far from wanting to fold NRA up and put it away in lavender, its chair-man appeared last week in Manhattan to declare: "It is my thought that the Congress should, and my hope that it will, adopt the policy of extending the National Industrial Recovery Act substantially in its present form for an additional period of one or two years."

Illuminating was General Johnson's account, published in his third article this week, of how he started Donald Randall Richberg on the road to the "Assistant Presidency." Wrote he: "I had never heard of Mr. Richberg, but he was recommended to me as a brilliant unknown. ... I sent and asked him to work with me on the bill. . . . He was practically unknown, except as a labor lawyer. I was fully aware of exactly what this would bring down on me from practically the whole of industry, from the Press, and from other large popular and political sectors, a charge that I had delivered NRA at the very outset into the hands of the labor side. . . .

"Just what I expected happened. . . . At that time Mr. Richberg stepped into the limelight more because of dead cats that were flung at me on his account than for any other reason."

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