Midway Man "It is fully expected that the Congress will shortly pass a new act extending the life of NRA with certain modifications and additions."
So said Franklin Roosevelt last week. It was a simple declaration of well-known fact. Yet on the surface it had all the earmarks of a political fantasy.
Why should any such thing happen? Labor has called NRA a snare and delusion. General Johnson called it a dead dodo. As a Recovery measure New Dealers have privately admitted it is a flop. Untold manufacturers kick about its theory and its practice. The case of Fred Perkins was a shrill public indictment. The success of its enforcement is compared to that of Prohibition. Certain Senators seize every opportunity to denounce it as an oppressor of honest business. Its advocates are few and its critics many. How can its renewal be a certainty or even a possibility?
Roosevelt's Reasons. Obviously the biggest single factor in NRA's renewal is that Franklin Roosevelt wants it renewed. As a parent it would certainly pain him to see the favorite Recovery child of his Administration die a death of legal limitation —especially after he has so often praised it for abolishing child labor. But it is dear to him for other reasons as well. He promised the U. S. a new order, social and economic. Most of his Administration's acts have not, however, attempted to set up such an order but rather to repair the old order, to rebalance what was out of balance, to rescue isolated groups from distress. But NRA alone, conceived principally as a Recovery measure, was a man-sized attempt to produce a new social and economic order, affecting everyone's method of earning a living. Under AAA and FERA farmers and the unemployed discarded old cards and drew new ones from the same old political pack. Only under NRA was the old pack thrown away and a brand new one brought forth. From it alone was dealt a completely new set of rights, rules and institutions to all industry and labor.