''History probably will record the National Industrial Recovery Act as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress. It represents a supreme effort to stabilize for all time the many factors which make for the prosperity of the nation."
Thus last week spoke a happy, happy President as he squiggled ''Franklin D. Roosevelt" at the bottom of the biggest piece of legislation he had gotten from an adjourning Congress. At the signing ceremony Senators and Representatives who had helped to whip the measure through just as the President wanted it beamed their pride and approval over the Roosevelt shoulder.
The special session of the 73rd Congress had hung up an amazing record of achievement in its 14-week sitting. It had sanctioned presidential economies that brought the ordinary budget close to balance. It had taken the U. S. off gold, provided for currency inflation. It had enacted a farm price-fixing bill that made earlier efforts at agricultural relief look puny and insignificant. It had arranged for a $2,000,000,000 refinancing program for farm, mortgages, $2,000,000,000 for home mortgages. Half a billion dollars was voted for direct unemployment relief. The Civilian Conservation Corps was created to put 275,000 idle young men to work in the woods. All these measures were desperate defenses, bulwarks against the immediate tidal wave of economic demoralization.
The Congress had also set up a legislative offensive against hard times. It had passed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, a vast experiment in Federal development of natural resources. The Emergency Railroad Act had provided Federal direction for a program to end wasteful duplication of services among the nation's carriers. The Securities bill was designed to clean up the evils of stock jobbery. The national banking structure had been reformed by the Glass-Steagall bill (see p. 45).
Important as they were, none of these laws compared in might, majesty and magnitude with the National Recovery Act. Into that measure had been packed the greatest public works program ($3,300,000,000) ever undertaken by one government and the largest peacetime powers over industrial wages, hours, prices and output ever given to one man in the U. S. It was President Roosevelt's do-or-die attack against the Depression. Just before he left for Boston on the first leg of his vacation, he gave the country his own estimate of it:
"The law I have just signed was passed to put people back to work—to let them buy more of the products of farms and factories and start our business at a living rate again. This task is in two stages— first, to get many hundreds of thousands of the unemployed back on the payroll by snowfall; and second, to plan for a better future for the longer pull. . . . As in the great crisis of the World War. it puts a whole people to the simple but vital test: Must we go on in many groping, disorganized, separate units to defeat, or shall we move as one great team to victory?"
Stage One— "While we shall not neglect the second, the first stage is an emergency job. It has the right of way."