Critics
Most businesses adopted the NRA without complaint, but Henry Ford was reluctant to join.
The National Recovery Review Board, headed by noted criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow, a prominent liberal, was set up by President Roosevelt in March 1934 and abolished by him that same June. The board issued three reports highly critical of the NRA from the perspective of small business, charging the NRA with fostering monopolies. The Darrow board, influenced by Justice Louis D. Brandeis, wanted instead to promote competitive capitalism.
Representing big business, the American Liberty League, 1934–40, was run by leading industrialists who opposed the liberalism of the New Deal. Regarding the controversial NRA, the League was ambivalent. Jouett Shouse, the League president, commented that "the NRA has indulged in unwarranted excesses of attempted regulation"; on the other, he added that "in many regards has served a useful purpose." Shouse said that he had "deep sympathy" with the goals of the NRA, explaining, "While I feel very strongly that the prohibition of child labor, the maintenance of a minimum wage and the limitation of the hours of work belong under our form of government in the realm of the affairs of the different states, yet I am entirely willing to agree that in the case of an overwhelming national emergency the Federal Government for a limited period should be permitted to assume jurisdiction of them."
British journalist Alistair Cooke described Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency of the United States of America in the two years from his inauguration to the Supreme Court's declaration that the National Recovery Administration was unconstitutional, as a benevolent dictatorship.
Read more about this topic: National Recovery Administration
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“I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.”
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