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Balance. When Franklin Roosevelt cast up accounts and definitely decided upon NRA's renewal, he had no easy task to decide on the form renewal should take. To surrender to either group of vested interests would have made enemies of the other. In addition he had a third group to satisfy, businessmen who believe that if a business writes its own ticket it will soon bankrupt the economic railroad on which it is traveling. What good, they ask, does it do a business to fix prices or restrict production if high prices ruin its market?
Thus the President sat at his desk last week balancing the good against the bad, the hopeful against the hopeless. As he came to his conclusions and put the finishing touches to his message to Congress for NRA's renewal, he was painfully aware that he was about to set off a fresh batch of oratorical pinwheels and skyrockets at the Capitol. Congressmen had not had a good rousing debate on NRA for more than a year and practically every member was spoiling to take the floor and fulminate on some minor grievance of NRA Administration within his district. There would be much noise, the President knew, and some light—but NRA would undoubtedly be renewed just about as the President wanted it.
Camel Man. Biggest asset that Franklin Roosevelt had in planning his renewal of NRA was his possession of a good midway man, Samuel Clay Williams, midway man in NRA theory, midway man (presumably) in NRA history. The one-man rule of this New Deal experiment ended with the resignation of General Johnson. It may return again to replace the present board-rule whenever President Roosevelt can find his man.
In 1933 Clay Williams first went up from North Carolina to deal with the New Deal on behalf of the tobacco business. He was a powerfully-formed, slow-spoken man of Scotch-Irish ancestry, born in Iredell County, part of Representative Bob Doughton's Congressional district. As a young lawyer he was picked by the late Richard J. Reynolds and brought up in the tradition of the company that makes Camels: a company in which every director is a salaried officer and gets down to the plant in the morning at the same hour as the men. That tradition does not make spectacular executives. Mr. Williams in due time became president of Reynolds Tobacco, had a 1,800-acre farm with blooded cattle down on the Yadkin River and got to work at 7:30 in the morning. But neither did that life blight his ability. When he paid his first visits to Washington in 1933 he went as the representative of the hard-headed big four cigaret makers with the job of getting a "re-employment agreement" (i. e. preliminary code) that suited them. He got a code that specified not a minimum but an average wage, and he got it without fireworks and without making enemies except in the labor camp. In fact he made decided friends of Hugh Johnson, Donald Richberg and Daniel Roper. He also got along very well with Franklin Roosevelt—over the package of Camels on the President's desk (see p. 16).